I

Friday, February 17, 1933

For nine years George Custer had picked rocks out of the three hundred and twenty acres he rented from James T. Vick, but still the wheat fields were not clear enough to suit him. Nothing made him madder than to hook into a big rock with a freshly sharpened plowshare or mower sickle. This late in the winter he had finished all the odd jobs that he saved for cold weather, and on a morning like this, with no special chores at hand, he hitched the team to the stoneboat and hauled rocks down the hill to the pile he was accumulating at the edge of the south grove. Every rock he took out of the best soil in the world made that soil even better. If it weren’t for drought and rust, this half section would be producing sixteen bushels to the acre. He was only a year older than the century, but he could remember when North Dakota soil yielded twenty or more.

An early thaw the first of the week had finished most of the snow, but a hard freeze last night had turned the earth back into iron. He had to use a crowbar to get the big ones loose. With rocks, a man couldn’t win for losing. During the times of the year when the ground wasn’t frozen, he was too busy doing other things with it to be taking rocks out of it.

He intended to make something with the rocks—a cool little well house, maybe, or a creamery. A man could build almost anything with rocks if he had the time. George had always wanted a house of stone. He wouldn’t build it, though, till he could buy the farm from Vick. He had already sunk so much cash and labor in this place that if Vick ever tried to push him off without making a decent settlement with him, he would be obliged to take a few thousand dollars out of the old man’s hide.

Crossing the field toward the small gray building that Vick called a house, he could see how it would look if it was his own house of stone, with the smoke from the two stoves drifting up from the broad stone chimney, and the white of fresh paint gleaming from the deep-set window casings.

He halted the team in front of the house and went in. “Man! It’s colder than a banker’s eye out there,” he told his wife. He scooped half a dipperful from the pail of drinking water and poured it into a cup. “That ground is so hard you couldn’t drive a spike into it with a sledge hammer. One of these days we’re gonna have enough rocks to build a house with, though. Warm in winter, cool in summer. How’d you like that?”

“I’d like it if we could just get the money to make a down payment on this place,” said Rachel.

“Well so would I! But just because we haven’t is no reason why we shouldn’t think ahead a little, is it?”

He shut the door harder than he really meant to and stomped back to the team. They were matched sorrels, a gelding and a mare, both young horses. The mare would drop her first foal in another three months, and he was working her this morning instead of one of his other two geldings because the weather had kept her from getting sufficient exercise lately. In spite of the outrageous fee, George had bred her to Otto Wilkes’s champion Percheron stallion, because with a dam like Kate it was silly not to use the best sire around. Besides, he wanted a colt that would grow to be considerably bigger than Kate, but still be possesed of her intelligence and fine disposition.

Between the horses he could glimpse the distant rock pile, and his eyes focused themselves on the spot, seeing how solid and eternal a stone house would look there, set beneath the thin black crisscrossing limbs of the grove. He was barely conscious of the four peaked ears dutifully bobbing up and down in the vague foreground of his sight, and at first it seemed, when two of the ears precipitately disappeared, that he had only got a flutter in his left eye.

Then he was running, yelling.

“King! Kate! Whoa! Whoa! King you bastard, King!”

A shrieking mindless thousand pounds of horseflesh, his calm and sensible mare, wallowed in its harness, half buried in the earth.

Dragged down by the strap hooking them together, King pulled back into his collar and reared his front legs as high as he could lift them. Every time his great shoes came down, they struck away clods of frozen earth and the hole widened.

George unsnapped two hooks and the freed horse leapt away before there was time to turn loose the reins.

And here was the mare at his feet, rolling white-ringed eyes, bubbling foam through her gaping pink lips. If she didn’t already have a broken leg, she would in the next few minutes—if she didn’t die of fright first.

He squatted at the edge of the hole. The thawing and freezing of the last few days had buckled the top crust of earth covering an old, poorly filled well. His trips with the stoneboat over that spot had further weakened the ground. He could not even guess how deep the well was, but he knew there could be other gaps in the shaft. Another six-foot drop of the ground beneath her and Kate would be beyond all help.

She was head down, lying on her side, craning her neck up against the wall of the shaft, with her hindquarters twisted and jammed up above the rest of her body in such a way that none of her terrible struggles could possibly bring her to her feet.

“What on earth! What on earth happened?”

Rachel was running to him, with the fool dog bouncing and barking beside her.

“Why it’s an old well, of course!” he shouted. “Now go fetch King while I get some planks.”

George dragged some timbers up from the granary and slid them into the hole behind the mare. He hooked her traces and King’s into a heavy ring.

“Now lead him straight back,” he told Rachel, “and when I tell you, hit him a good one on the rump so’s he’ll start out fast.”

“How can I hit him on the rump if I’m up in front leading him?” Rachel said.

“Oh, Rachel! For God’s sake, haven’t you got any imagination at all?”

Rachel hauled on King’s bridle. The horse made her pull his head and stretch out his neck as far as it would go before he moved his feet. He laid his ears back and bugged out his eyes, trying to look around his blinders and see what George had hitched him up to.

When the slack was out of the traces, George yelled, “Get up, King! Back, Kate, back!”

The mare wrenched and hurled herself dangerously and uselessly. The traces pulled from the wrong angle. Then the ring broke and leather snakes whipped back around King’s legs.

“Hold him!” George cried. “For the love of Mike, what did you let him go for? My God!”

He sprinted after the horse. King did not stop till he reached the barnyard fence. George grabbed his bridle and ran up the hill with the gelding snorting and side-stepping behind him.

“Now hold him here!” He thrust the bit into Rachel’s hands. She bent a cold fist around the cold steel at the horse’s jaw. The gelding tossed his head roughly, yanking her arm up as far as she could reach. She had always been afraid of him.

“Oh, he’s just bluffing you!” George said. “He knows he can get away with it, and he’ll try it again. Now hang on to him!”

George ran to the porch and returned with a clanking pile of chain. He reached down into the hole and raised up Kate’s thick black tail. He tied the tail to the chain with a knot that took the whole length of the tail.

“Oh, George!” Rachel was appalled. “That will kill her!”

“Oh pshaw!” he yelled. “Women!”

George snapped the gelding’s traces into the chain. “Now make him pull!” he ordered. “Wallop him one!”

“Get up!” Rachel cried.

George let himself down into the hole, squatted with his legs braced wide apart, cupped his hand around the curve of the mare’s thigh, and shoved from his shoulder. Coupled with King’s pulling, the shove steered her leg on to the planks.

“Dammit!” he shouted. “Smack him one! Keep him going!”

Kate was lifted and righted enough to get her front legs under her. Then her hind feet were digging and sliding on the boards.

King leaned into his collar. George vaulted out of the well, grabbed the chain, and set himself as anchor man at the edge of the hole.

Between heaves he shouted, “Back up, Kate! Whoa back! That’s a girl!”

In a monstrous, sickening, leg-breaking scramble, the mare wrestled herself up out of the hole, nearly trampling George and causing King to plunge ahead in an access of released power. Rachel lost her hold on him again and stood, numb and shaking, waiting for George to tell her what to do.

But his concern now was for the mare. “Whoa back, Kate,” he said. “Back. That’s a girl. Back now, Kate.” His voice was low and gentle, and his hands held her bridle lightly and stroked her wet neck with compassion.

The horse trembled but she stood still, with her weight squarely on all four legs. It was hard to believe he had been so lucky. She might go lame, but no bones were fractured. Now if she just wouldn’t cast the foal.

“There, now, Kate,” he said. “There, now, old girl. That wasn’t so bad after all, was it? Not so bad as you and a lot of other people thought it was going to be, was it? You never even felt it, did you? You’re just lucky it was me that was around, you know that? Yes, sir, Kate. You’re just a lucky old nag, here. You’re going to be just as good as new once I turn loose your tail.”

He went back and disentangled the chain. Swatches of long black hairs were strung through the links. He pulled out a handful of hairs and held them up to Kate’s nose.

“See that?” he said to the horse, but loud enough for Rachel to hear. “Now, then, that wasn’t much of your tail to lose, was it? Some people around here thought I was going to pull the whole thing right off.” He rubbed her ears and ran his hands over her legs. “You’re not going to go and get a gimpy leg on me now, are you, Kate?”

Rachel said, “Do you need me for anything else?”

“No, you might as well go on back in. I guess I’ll throw this load of rocks into this damned hole here, after I unhitch.” He led the horses down to the barn.

She walked back to the house. The baby was fussing in the other room, but Rachel did not go in to her. She sat down on the kitchen stool and leaned her elbows on her thighs so she could hold up her head with her hands. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again the odd dots kept on falling through the blankness for a moment and then her vision returned. She got up and washed her hands in water she dipped from the bucket on the washstand into the mottled blue graniteware basin. She dried them on a terrycloth towel as thin and bare and flat as flour sacking.

What if they had lost Kate? She didn’t see how they could ever have bought another. Without a four-horse team George would never get the wheat in. She couldn’t stop thinking about how bad it could have been.

George had apparently recovered by the time he came in for another drink of water. “You know,” he said, “a lot of men that don’t treat their horses right never could have done that. Their horses wouldn’t have trusted them enough. I know some men that would have lost that horse. They would’ve just had to shoot her, probably, if they couldn’t get her out before she broke a leg. You’ve got to know how to handle a horse, and you’ve got to really like them.”

He rested his hands on his hips, straightened his shoulders back, and took a great breath that swelled out his chest. “Well,” he said, “I reckon I better get out there and fix up that hole some son-of-a-gun left for me.” He gave her another moment to tell him what an astounding rescue he had made and to admit that hooking on to Kate’s tail was the only scheme that would have worked in time.

“Thank God you got her out,” Rachel said.

He dumped the last of his water into the wash basin and walked out. He began rolling the rocks into the well. He figured Kate had probably tromped it down pretty well, but a load of rocks was a good bet to cause it to collapse as much more as it was going to. He’d just have to leave it that way till the ground thawed out. Then he’d be able to tamp it down some more and fill it in properly. When he’d emptied the stoneboat he went down to check on Kate.

He was prepared to find that she was going to cast the foal, but even though he was prepared, it made him sick. After the first eight months had gone so well—to have her lose it with only three more months to go. It was queer how an animal as big and powerful as a horse was so hard to breed and so liable to abort at almost any time.

“Oh, Kate,” he said softly. “Now what do you want to go and do this for?”

Any mare he’d ever known wanted privacy at a time like this, so he went back to the cows’ end of the barn and sat on a milkstool. He thought of the stud fee he’d paid that deadbeat Otto, and felt sicker.

He sat down on a milk stool and rolled a cigarette. The match glimmered brightly in the gloom of the barn, and he watched it till the flame reached his fingers. Damn the son-of-a-bitch that would leave a hole like that. Didn’t a man have enough trouble from enemies he already knew about without being dealt a blow like this from some idiot whose name he would never even know?

He remembered how a schoolmate of his had fallen down an old well like this one. It was spring and the ground was wet. The well was so old that all the curbing had rotted away and the sides kept collapsing on the boy. They had got him out alive, but he grew up peculiar.

He could tell from the way Kate was stamping around that the foal wasn’t born yet. He wished she’d hurry up about it if she was going to do it. He wanted to get back to work. After this morning’s catastrophes, he felt more desperately far behind than ever. This last year he had got so far behind that he sometimes caught himself saying, “What’s the use?”

George Armstrong Custer saying, “What’s the use?”

He thought, as he so often did, of how things had changed so much faster than anybody had ever supposed they would. George had been born a mere twenty-three years after his namesake rode a high-stepping sorrel horse into ambush at the Little Big Horn. His grandfather had come from Illinois to homestead in the Dakota Territory just two years after General Custer was killed. The old man loved to tell about how he had been to Bismarck when it was nothing but a ferry landing on the Missouri River and a place for the soldiers from Fort Abraham Lincoln to get booze and women. And two years after the Boy General was dead, he was still, after booze and women, the main topic of conversation. Fort Abraham Lincoln—four miles from Bismarck—the westernmost fort in the north of the continent. And out of it had ridden the troops behind the fearless redheaded cavalryman—so nearly immortal while he was alive, so obviously mortal when they found his white, naked body lying along with all the others on the hillside.

George’s old granddaddy would not believe his eyes if he could see Bismarck now. Here the twenty-story white tower of the capitol rose up from the prairie—there a silver bridge spanned the Missouri, and beyond, Highway 10, the Red Trail, proceeded in a humdrum concrete strip through the country of Sitting Bull and on to the Pacific Ocean. Yet George himself had been born on the western frontier, and his grandfather had seen fit to bestow on him the name of a frontier hero. When he was a lad of six or seven, herding cows in the unfenced pastures, he would kick over a buffalo skull every time he went after a stray calf or ran a badger down a hillside. Some of the skulls even had patches of hide on them.

It was all over in Kate’s stall. He stood up and buttoned his sheepskin coat. He drew on his heavy leather gloves and pulled the flaps of his hunting cap down over his ears. He was a big man, nearly six feet three, and almost two hundred pounds. He could still spring up from a milk stool as light as a cat on his feet, but the job ahead of him at the moment did not cause him to move in such a manner.

He pushed the wheelbarrow down the aisle, hoping the fetus wouldn’t be too hard to look at. It was a light little thing, seemingly perfect. The afterbirth was normal. Kate was feverish, but that was to be expected. He made sure the blanket he’d put on her was securely fastened. After he got the foal out of her stall, he’d bring her some water.

He loaded it in the wheelbarrow and pushed it out of the barn. He’d wait till it dried off and then drag it out where the coyotes would take care of it. He might be able to shoot a couple when they came to the carcass and earn himself some bounty money.

He felt like going after bigger game than coyotes. He felt like shooting the bastard who’d left that hole. He felt like shooting the storekeeper whose lousy cash gobbled up land that other people had tamed for him. A man born on the frontier, dammit, had a right to own enough land to build himself a house on.

He looked across the pasture hills to the heavy noon sky. He wondered if it would be snowing by the time he would have to drive into town to get Lucy from school. When he was seven years old, nobody had toted him back and forth from school, but things were different nowadays. He couldn’t think when it was that he had last come across a buffalo skull.

Will Shepard braced himself against the eccentricities of the springs under the truck seat while he coasted over the thumping timbers that were laid between the railroad tracks as a concession to whatever traffic found itself at cross purposes with the Northern Pacific’s main line.

He glanced out to his right to see if old Millard Adams was watching for a wave from him, but he saw no one at all in the depot—just the boards of the building and the platform. Those of the building had once been painted and those of the platform had not, but for a long time they had all been the same color. Only the letters at either end of the building had been retouched. They said EUREKA.

Most of the town was either to Will’s right or straight ahead of him to the north. The tracks to his left stretched west, accompanied only by telegraph wires except for the faraway shapes of Clarence Egger’s farmyard.

In front of Will, at the corner across the street from the depot, was Herman Schlaht’s store, and on up the street were Gebhardt’s pool hall, the bank, and the café. It was the bank that Will was heading for first. He let the truck roll along past it, applying a minimum of pressure on the brake pedal so as to spare himself the awful squalling of the worn steel shoes slipping against the drums. He must get the truck down to Ray Vance for a new set of brakes before the busy season started. He turned the wheel so the tires rubbed into the low bank of snow piled along the wooden sidewalk, and the truck stopped. He opened the door and jumped out; he was in a hurry to get rid of the tobacco plug in his mouth because he hadn’t been able to spit since he crossed the tracks.

He sent it plopping into the snowbank, where it added its sprawling brown stain to the other offenses committed against that mound since the last snow. It was forty years since he had begun to chew to prove, when he was sixteen years old, that he was as tough as any other man in any threshing crew in the world. By the time he didn’t need the proof any more, he was stuck with the habit.

Except for that pile accumulated from the clearings of the road and the sidewalk, most of the snow had been taken away by the wind. The wind robbed them of the water in the snow. After fighting through ten-foot drifts for six months, they were likely to be told by the official measurers that a hard winter had left them perhaps three inches of water in the ground. So far this winter there had been half of three inches, but the heaviest snows of the season might still be on the way. He looked up at the early afternoon sky, thick and gray with the moisture that didn’t come down. It just stayed there, apparently frozen solid for the whole ninety-three million miles between him and the sun.

He stamped down the sidewalk, trying to pound some blood back into his feet. He had got chilled in the three-mile drive to town, for the holes around the pedals in the floor of the truck aimed a frigid wind at his feet and legs.

He was not a tall man, but neither was he quite so short as his stocky body or the comparison of it with the generally taller bodies of his neighbors made him appear. His face was milder than it used to be, his middle was rounder, and his head was nearly bald. The years of his astonishing strength were gone. Nevertheless, there was no one in town who did not know that once when Will Shepard had wanted to get a Ford engine block from Leroy Kellogg’s to Ray Vance’s garage across the street, he had simply lifted the engine on his back and carried it over and set it down in a spot that was convenient for Ray.

Now, at fifty-six, he still worked right along with the young men he hired on his farm, but without competing—only with gratitude that he was given the strength to continue bearing the great burdens he allotted to himself. Work had rewarded him. In this desperate time he owned free and clear a full section of land as rich as any that existed anywhere on earth, plus buildings, machinery, and stock. He had, in addition, a sizable savings account and a few collapsed securities which had a fair chance to recover, providing, of course, that the nation itself survived. He had been just the right age to ride the country’s good years and the best twenty years of all time for wheat—the first two decades of the century. He had been too old to go to war sixteen years ago, but young enough to manage five hundred acres of wheat land yielding thirteen bushels or more to the acre, at prices up to two dollars and seventy cents a bushel. His wheat checks had mounted well into five figures for several years, and the net returns had made the farm his. He himself had made no war sacrifices, and he felt indebted to those who had. His business now was with a man who had gone to war.

Harry Goodman was the man. He had started up the bank in Eureka soon after the war and he was nearly forty now. The twenty flabby pounds Harry had put on since he came to Eureka had transformed him from a thin young man to a fat older man, for his frame was much too short and slight to make any sort of graceful adjustment to so much added weight. For a while Harry had displayed an enlarged, cloudy, full-length photograph of himself in his overseas uniform. “Here I am,” the picture seemed to say, “a doughboy just like the boys who boarded the train right here in Eureka. Here are my lumpy puttees over my polished boots, my creaseless pants, and my soup-dish helmet. And here, hanging from my arm, my goggle-eyed mask, to preserve me from the Kaiser’s mustard gas.”

But after a few years Harry had taken down the picture, perhaps because of the increasing discrepancy between the length of the webbed belt in the picture and the length of the belt he now required, perhaps because no one in Eureka had appeared to see the connection between him and the hometown doughboys, perhaps because he had wished to hang his Notary Public sign over that spot on the wall.

Will had been glad to have a banker come and open up shop in Eureka, even if the fellow was a Jew, even if a few country banks had already failed. Jamestown was nearly thirty miles away, and it was inconvenient to go there every time he needed the services of a bank. He had immediately transferred a small part of his Jamestown savings to Harry’s bank and opened a checking account. Over the years his confidence in Harry had grown; and gradually he had increased the amount he kept in Harry’s bank until, for the last several years, Harry had had almost all of it.

To some of the tall, belligerent Gentiles who came to his window, or inside to his office, Harry was belligerent in return. To a few he was ingratiating. To all he was adamant. Thus he had hung on, year after year through the twenties, while seven thousand other banks failed, and through the last three years after the crash when another seven thousand closed their doors.

Will did not doubt that Harry was in good shape, but he did like to drop in to the bank fairly often. He had a feeling that he would know if the moment came when he ought to make a withdrawal. He had seen no reason to join those depositors who had withdrawn everything and presumably buried it. Credit was already hard enough to get—mortgages hard enough to extend. Quite obviously the whole country would cease to function if people withdrew their support from all the institutions that kept it going. That truth seemed so obvious, in fact, and Harry’s service to the community seemed so necessary, that Will felt impatient with those who had been so quick to panic.

On Tuesday, though, the state of Michigan had been treated to Governor Comstock’s Valentine, and that had made Will a tiny bit nervous. Michigan’s governor was not the first governor to close all the banks in his state, but Michigan seemed closer to North Dakota than any of the other states.

Will walked up the three wooden steps and opened the door of Harry’s bank. Harry came to the window.

“Hello … hello, Mr. Shepard! I’m … so glad you came by today.”

“Hello, Harry.” Will was embarrassed. He was afraid Harry knew why he came so often for such petty business. “I’m just going to get a little cash. Ten dollars will do it.” He began to write out the check.

“Mr. Shepard—wait a minute. Just let me check your balance here. Just a minute.”

“My balance?”

“Mr. Shepard, you and I have been friends a long time, right? Ten years, right? You’ve been a good friend of mine … here. Here it is. It’s all up to date. Two thousand, eight hundred and sixty-seven. That’s your balance—checking and savings. Make it out for that!”

Will couldn’t understand it. He’d been Harry’s friend; now Harry wanted him to withdraw his entire account. Was Harry so deeply offended just because of these frequent small checks? Will was horrified to think that his petty fears had so injured a man for whom he felt nothing but respect and sympathy.

Harry began counting out bills from his drawer and Will opened his mouth to beg Harry’s pardon. But he closed it, in shock, as he would recoil from the lung-searing breath of a blizzard wind. The window with the terrible face in it was the window that had opened at last between him and the storm burying the world. There was nothing at all to say.

Harry scuttled to the vault and came back with more bills. “I’ll make it all twenties and fifties,” he said. He jammed his finger into a rubber tip and began sliding off the fifties into a pile on Will’s side of the window.

The bills slapped down so fast that Will could not begin to say “a half of a hundred dollars” to himself as each one dropped. He lost count after the first three or four and just watched.

“Hurry up!” Harry said, and Will finally understood what he ought to be doing. It wasn’t counting. He peered back over his shoulder into the empty street and began rolling up the bills and tucking them into his inside pockets. He finished writing the check for whatever records Harry meant to leave just as Harry finished counting out the last full hundred. Then Harry threw out three twenties, paused an instant, and tossed out another twenty instead of hunting up the seven.

“It doesn’t make any difference!” he cried, waving his hands in the air. “What is it all now? Paper! Just paper!” Shocked as he was, Will was shocked anew at hearing a banker say what he himself had always thought about money.

He stowed away the last of the bills and pushed the check across to Harry. He laid down the bank’s pen and awkwardly took the short white hand trembling and reaching for his beneath the barred window. Already the guilt of his special treatment was between him and the little man.

“You’re a good friend,” Harry insisted again.

Will had to get out before he was seen. “So long,” he said. He knew he ought to say something else, and before he could stop it, a bit of parting advice he frequently gave to Harry slipped out. It was like a nightmare in which he heard himself speaking obscenities and then more obscenities every time he tried to apologize for himself—all the while comprehending what he was doing, but never able to react in time.

“Don’t take any wooden nickels,” were the words that leapt out of his mouth.

He touched the bill of his cap in a last helpless salute and furtively closed the door of Harry’s bank. The frozen boards of the sidewalk creaked and snapped; they rumbled beneath him, sent alarms ahead of him, and echoed behind him. It was all he could do to keep from looking back or at least stopping suddenly to trick the man following him into taking two more thundering steps than he took himself. And all the while he knew the street was as empty as it was when he walked out of the bank. It seemed impossible that the rolls of stiff new bills did not show right through his sheepskin coat or that it was not written on his face that Harry was going to close the Eureka Bank that Friday afternoon. It had been about fifty years since Will had been a party to any sort of conspiracy. Harry was closing the bank, but Harry was going to keep a few “friends” from suffering. It was no more real than a boyhood game.

After all, Harry had hung on for so long. It was true that the real crisis had finally come. Hoover was waiting out the last weeks of his term like a man tied across the railroad tracks in front of an express train.

Still, he couldn’t understand why Harry Goodman had managed all this time and then failed. If he had been speculating with the deposits, he ought to have gone down long before this. His extreme conservatism had made the farmers who needed loans hate him bitterly, but it should have brought him through, too. Will remembered the last statement of assets he had read, and if it was correct, Harry was stable enough. Harry had a total of seventy-five thousand dollars or so in cash deposits, and his loans seemed to be in about the right percentage. But perhaps even Harry had not been conservative enough to protect himself against the terrible deflation of property values. Men had mortgaged their farms in order to speculate in meaningless paper stocks, and when their property declined by more than half, many of the mortgages were only meaningless paper, with figures written on them that represented more than the farms could be sold for. It was all paper—just paper.

Will became aware that he was shaking his head—he felt his day-old beard scratching against his high coat collar. People he would pass in the street would wonder if he had gotten his, and he would wonder if they had gotten theirs, and he would never again be free of the knowledge that he possessed, mostly by sheer chance, a little bit of the money that belonged to at least half of his friends and neighbors. Will wondered how bad the failure was—would the depositors get back fifty cents on a dollar? Forty? Two bits? A dime?

What ought he to do with the money? The only thing he could think of was to bury it. Why put it in another bank? He’d already used up more luck than he could expect to see in the rest of his life. He decided to buy a metal box to bury it in. When he came to a notch knocked through the bank of frozen snow, he stepped down off the sidewalk and crossed the street to Zack Hoefener’s hardware store.

He thought, as he opened the door, that Zack would be sure to ask him what the box was for, but the thought came too late. He entered just as Zack came in through the rear door. Zack had been burning packing paper in the dented oil drum he used for an incinerator. His face, a complex map of abused capillaries, was purple with cold, and he smelled of smoke and whiskey. Where did he get it all the time, Will wondered. Drunk or sober he was ornery, but he owned the only hardware store within twenty miles.

Will said, “Hello, Zack,” and Zack replied with a bob of his head that sent a quiver through the massive goiter hanging from his neck.

Zack made fists of his smudged hands and leaned on his knuckles on the counter. He always made his customers ask for what they wanted; he never asked them. He wasn’t any god-damn waiter, he often said to himself.

“Have you got some kind of a good strong metal securities box—about like so?” Will measured with his hands.

“Need it to keep all those gold-mine stocks in? Save ’em for your grandchildren?” Zack demanded.

“Well,” Will said, “I’ll grant you I haven’t clipped any coupons for a while. But there’s no use starting any fires with them yet. Never can tell. Roosevelt just might get some things to moving again.”

Zack hunched his shoulders, sending another spasm through his goiter.

“Roosevelt won’t be alive ten days after he’s in office,” he said, “even if he lives long enough to be sworn in at all. Somebody else with better aim will get him.”

“Oh, you know that fellow that tried to shoot him was as crazy as a June bug.”

“Who cares how crazy he was! A bullet is a bullet, no matter who shoots it. You wait and see. He’ll never make it.” Zack bulged his eyes at Will. Then he turned and stalked to the back of the store. He plucked a small black box from a shelf, hooked two broad fingers under its dusty nickel handle, and dangled it toward Will. “Big enough?” he asked.

“It’s fine,” Will said. He reached cautiously into a pocket, trying to remember where he had put the twenties. He didn’t want to give Zack a fifty. It was quick thinking for Harry not to have given him anything bigger than fifties, but even fifties were mighty rare birds. He fell behind Zack while they walked to the front of the store and managed to get a look at the bill he had pulled out. It was a twenty.

“By God, you could buy me out with that!” Zack expostulated when he saw the money.

“Well, I’ve finally got to break it,” Will said.

“I won’t hardly have no change left,” Zack complained. “This here is the third big bill I’ve broke today. If I can’t get to the bank I won’t have no change for tomorrow.… That’s one-eighty-five out of twenty—for God’s sake.” He scraped the coins out of the little metal compartments and slid bills out from under their wire holders.

Will wondered if any of the other big bills had appeared for the same reason his had, and if so, who Harry’s other lucky friends were.

“See you later, Zack,” Will said. He drew on his gloves and tucked the box under his arm. Zack nodded his head once and then fell to stroking his goiter, thoughtfully, as though he could not quite believe that it was there.

Will bought the groceries on the list Rose had given him. They came to $5.87. That plus the cashbox came to $7.72. Subtract that from $2880 and it left $2872.28—more money than he had had in the bank in the first place, thanks to Harry’s haste and ruin. He said goodby to Herman and hurried around the corner and back up the street toward his truck. He passed Gebhardt’s Pool Hall with the hotel rooms up above, where the Gebhardts lived. It was the only two-story building on the block, and it made the bank look very small and fragile down below it. The whole bank probably had no more floor space than Will’s parlor, though it had never occurred to him before to think of it that way.

He slid his hand under his coat to pat the springy round rolls in the pockets of his shirts and overalls. When the money had been in that little building it had seemed like so much more. Before it became paper in his pockets it had been a varying number on the statements sent out from that building; then it had seemed like an entity that could be expected to exercise some care in its own behalf—not a helpless abstraction, totally dependent on the conventions and caprices of men.

Will looked down as he passed the bank and did not look up again till he was aware of the darkness of his figure mirrored in the window of Gus and Ruby’s Café-Restaurant. The sky was a little grayer with the advance of the afternoon. It was possible to believe that the sun had gone another ninety-three million miles away. It was possible to believe almost anything.

He climbed into the truck and started around the block to head for home. But more commanding than the few simple lines he had to look at in order to drive was the persistent image of his last view of Harry’s bank. There was the partition across the center of what was really only a single room. On the customers’ side of the partition were the greasy floorboards, a shelf suspended from the wall, and a hatrack. The shelf held pen, ink, deposit slips, and blank checks. Over it hung the calendar for 1933 with only the January sheet torn from it. The calendar bore the picture of a tall, narrow building more than half a continent away. The building was the headquarters for a life insurance company. Around its top radiated the beams of a halo that culminated in the legend THE LIGHT THAT NEVER FAILS.

But humble as it was, the bank had been a three-dimensional reality, and it had imparted the illusion of reality to the abstraction it housed. Now there was nothing more to the abstraction than the thin paper in Will’s pockets. If the boom had been all on paper, why couldn’t the collapse be all on paper too? That was what he hadn’t been able to understand for years.

He had never had so much cash in his possession before, and it seemed as though it would hardly make any difference at all if two or three fifties fluttered out of his pockets and whirled away through the holes around the pedals.

Halfway home he began to feel a cold ache in his fingertips and he realized he was squeezing the wheel as if it was the only thing left on earth to hang on to. It had been a frightful week. First there was Governor Comstock’s Valentine; on the very next day the President-elect—the country’s last hope—had nearly been killed by the six bullets fired at him by a crazy man; and two days later Harry Goodman closed the Eureka Bank.

He drove up his graveled approach and past the house to the shed. He patted two or three of his pockets once more, gathered his purchases in his arms, and walked toward the lamplit kitchen to tell Rose that the final disaster had come to Eureka, too.

There was less than an hour to go for Harry after Will left. He finished doing what he could with the books. It was just a safe minimum of juggling that he did. After all, any man had a right to the means for a fresh start for himself and his family. A couple of thousand one way or another could not do nearly as much for his depositors as it could do for him.

He doubted that any of them had given him any credit at all for keeping the bank going after the crash, or even for saving some individual necks, too, when the crash came. In all the years he had been here, he and his family could count on their fingers the number of times they had been invited out for Sunday dinner. But if a man wanted to get into banking this was the only kind of place he could do it—if he was a Jew. Back East they would laugh if a Jew even applied for a teller’s job. They would tell him to go open a hock shop. He sometimes wondered if the people here in this godforsaken town thought he had come here because he couldn’t think of better places to live.

Well, almost all of them had done their bit to finish him, and now they would suffer as much as he would. If they were going to run him out, he could take a little along and still be fairer to them than they had been to him. They had tried to borrow money against damaged crops, rotting barns, starving cattle, and worthless machinery. They came into his bank smelling of manure and they spat all over the outside of his cuspidor.

The final respite from his doubting twinges had come when he figured out how to fix up Will and some other decent ones. He felt cleared and justified—and exhilarated. It was the only time in his life he had ever possessed real power, and it didn’t matter that his power came from his ruin. The important thing was that he could reward and he could punish.

The fourth time he hauled his watch from its pocket under his belly he saw that at last it was time to close. He pulled down the wooden window and locked it from the inside. Then he slammed the door of the vault and turned the knob on the dial. He adjusted his silk scarf around his neck and he was putting on his overcoat when he heard the door slam.

“I’m all closed up!” he yelled through the partition.

“I gotta have change for tomorrow,” Zack Hoefener yelled back. “You and your damn soft banker’s hours. Open up!” He rapped pointlessly against the bars of the closed window.

Harry unlocked the window and slid it up, pushing almost as high as his short arm could reach. “What do you need, Zack?”

Zack was looking at his hat and scarf. “Leaving a little early, ain’t you?” Hoefener, of course, had never trusted him. He had been one of the first to draw out nearly all of a big savings account when things began to look bad.

“I’m catching a cold,” Harry said. “Never have gotten used to these Dakota winters.”

Zack looked at him again, in that way he had, as though he had a right to stare. He thrust his three crisp twenties at Harry. “All this in pennies and silver,” he said.

“Fine,” Harry replied.

Zack slammed the door the way he always did, and Harry remembered the way he had slammed it after the argument they had had over his big withdrawal.

“I have to have thirty days’ notice for a withdrawal like that,” Harry had protested.

“You and how many other men are gonna tell me that?” Hoefener had asked. He had been a little drunker than usual. Harry had given him the money, and after that Harry had had to listen to him brag about what a foolproof and ingenious hiding place he had hit upon. He bragged about it to nearly everybody who came into his store. And then they came out of the store, headed straight across the road to the bank, and made their withdrawals.

Harry buttoned his overcoat and locked his door. Zack was just entering his store. Harry got one more look at the man’s monstrous profile before he turned and headed up the sidewalk, his rubbers thumping on the boards and his satchel swinging heavily from his shaking arm.

“What’s that?” Rose said to Will when he set the cashbox on the table with the groceries.

She had put the lamp on the table to work by, and the light of it made deep shadows in the sockets of her eyes. She was nearly as tall as he was, but thin from the erosions of her austerity, which sought to conquer all hungers. There was little gray in her brown hair, though it was dull with years, and wind-worn like the boards of a house. She wore it in a bun that was thick not from the profusion of the hair but from the length of it. She swept it back so tightly that it seemed to pull at the fine skin of her temples, drawing out the length of her hazel eyes and smoothing the elegant eminences of her cheekbones. Had she known that her stern and simple hair fashion was the best possible one for her face, she might have changed it, for she had devoted much of her life to the mortification of the flesh and to plucking out the eye that might offend.

After she had spoken she waited, her mouth having returned to the position of a mouth which tried never to make frivolous movements. Her jaws were square without being heavy or hard. Their squareness was perfect for the rest of her face, but the perfection made the face seem unapproachable.

It was the kind of face that in her extreme youth had either frightened off a man or challenged him. Most men had been frightened; Will had first been challenged and then he had recognized that she was beautiful. He kept his eyes on her face while he reached under his coat and brought out a roll of fifties.

“Will, what have you done?” she gasped.

He had always had a tendency to grin, nervously and broadly and uncontrollably, when he really wanted to fight or roar with misery. He could feel his lips twitching as he said, “Harry has closed the bank. All washed up.”

“Oh, Will! What will we do?”

“I’ve got it all.” He began pulling the rolls out of his pockets.

The money fell on the steel table-top with little rustling sounds, as of birds alighting and settling upon their evening roosts.

“How will we keep it all?” she asked, when the last roll had fallen. “What shall we do with it?”

His proposal sounded even more outrageous than he had expected it to. “I know it sounds silly, but I suppose we ought to bury it, like everybody else. I suppose it’ll be good as long as there’s anything left of the country.”

Her quick agreement surprised him. “Yes,” she said positively. “It mustn’t be in the house.… Oh, Will, thank God you got it. How did you know? How did you get it?”

He shrugged his shoulders; he hadn’t yet taken off his coat and it was getting heavy. He was beginning to feel heavy, too—to sag after the shock. “I didn’t know,” he said. “Harry just gave it to me. We didn’t talk about what happened. I don’t know why it happened.”

When they looked at the money again it seemed like less than it had when it was flowing from his pockets. By now Will was getting used to the way the same amount of money could expand and shrink by turns. It lay in loose curls between the slab of bacon tied in brown paper and the twenty-pound sack of sugar slumping in portly wrinkles of lettered cloth.

Neither of them had any impulse to count the bills. They unrolled them and flattened them into the box. Then they closed the lid and flipped the catch in front and tried it in different places in the house. Finally they decided to keep it under the bed for the night.

They sat down to their supper, repeating the Lord’s Prayer together as they did three times each day. Then they thought of George and Rachel.

“Will, do the children have anything in the bank?” Rose asked anxiously.

“I’ve been wondering,” Will said. “I don’t see how it could be much. I wish they would let us make it up to them, whatever it is.”

“George would die first!”

“I know.”

“Will, if you rushed back into town now do you suppose you could catch Harry and ask him just for George’s deposits?”

“Oh, no. Harry’s a good many miles away from here by now—that’s a cinch. And nobody knows which direction, either.”

He leaned back in his chair and stared across his plate at the blackness on the other side of the dining room windows. A long crack split one of the windows diagonally from top to bottom. He could not see the crack because of the darkness, but he could see the button in the middle of it, tied through to the button on the other side to steady the fracture and make the window less likely to shatter. Lightning had done it. He had been in the room when the bolt stabbed through the window—hissing, crackling, booming, ripping out his eardrums and blowing the house to smithereens. Still—even as it trundled away—it possessed him; with its own detonations it commanded and contained the detonations of his heart; within the grinding concussions of its bowels it whirled the bursting organs of his own digestion. Finally it mocked him. It tumbled his splitting, craven head back into the room and declined to execute the claim it had established. Then he found, first, that he was alive, next, that the house had not exploded—it was not even on fire—and last, that his eardrums were in their accustomed place, aching.

Why it had let him go he could not guess. While it possessed him he had thought how coincidental and how appropriate. His oldest brother had died by lightning.

Will never fixed the window, though he was not sure why. Perhaps it was for a bond with his brother. Perhaps it was superstition—so long as the window remained cracked, all other bolts would pass by. Perhaps it was merely to remind him of how capriciously death frolicked in a man’s house.

It wasn’t that he was afraid to die but that he hoped passionately, perhaps ungratefully or even irreverently, to live long enough to be assured that things were going to get better. He had fathered two children and worked inhumanly hard to give them what he had never had himself. But neither of them, at the moment, was in anything like the circumstances he had envisioned for them.

“Why did Rachel marry George?” he said to Rose.

“George was a very handsome man when she married him,” said Rose.

“Would a girl with a mind like Rachel’s really marry a man for his looks?” Will demanded.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Who knows why anybody marries anybody?”

“But why in thunderation didn’t she marry that boy in college?” he asked.

“Maybe she was too young. Maybe it was a mistake to send her when she was only sixteen. Maybe if she’d been older …”

“But Rose, there was nothing here for her! What else could we have done? Kept her on the farm driving a tractor till she was eighteen—till she forgot half of what she’d learned? Once you start an education you’ve got to keep on with it, that’s all.”

Rose was silent. She was right, he thought. Nobody knew why anybody married anybody.

After a while he couldn’t help himself any longer and he had to say it:

“I wonder where Stuart is.”

“We’ll probably hear when he gets short on money again.” Rose pushed away and began to clear the table. Stuart had been gone nearly two years and she still refused to talk about him.

The next morning Will went out early, before the eastern rim of his gray fields had yet rounded toward the sun, and buried his box of money.

He walked through the orchard from the gate—six trees up, two over—and he chopped with his pick on the downhill side of a dead crab-apple tree. As the daylight grew he looked nervously up and down the road. He felt like a criminal or a fool, or both.

He winced a little when he heard the first chunk of frozen earth thud against the box. He filled the hole, brushed the bit of snow back over his digging, and tramped it around a little. He had chosen that particular tree because he knew it was dead. Last summer’s drought and this winter’s sudden plunging freezes had finished it off. He was almost as tall as the tree. He had to admit that it had not done so well as he had promised Rose that it would do, and it certainly was not so hardy as the catalog had told him it would be.

Saturday, February 18

Otto Wilkes trotted his showy team of matched dappled-gray Percherons across the railroad tracks, nearly catapulting his two youngest and lightest boys off the back end of the wagon. A gelding and a stallion the horses were, and they weighed a ton apiece. He had hated to geld the one, but the other, being three years older, was already mature and a proven sire, so he had had no choice. Otto didn’t want to try to manage a team of two Percheron stallions.

He pulled up before the dusty window that read “HOEFENER’S EUREKA HARDWARE, Agent for John Deere Tractors & Equipment.”

“All right boys,” he said. “You can come in with me.”

He lifted the smallest of the four, who was scarcely able to walk yet, and they all lined up behind him and followed him into the store.

Zack saw them as they pulled up, and he shoved his dark brown bottle under the cash register. He didn’t know who made him sicker—Otto with his brassy, pickthank ways, or Otto’s numberless, shivering, dirty-nosed children breathing loudly through their mouths.

Otto bought a box of rivets for some harness repair he was doing and some other harness fittings. The whole purchase came to just under a dollar, but Otto wrote out a check for five.

“I’m not no bank!” Zack objected when he saw the check. “Why don’t you ever come in town on a weekday and get your cash over at the bank? Is this thing gonna bounce on me? I’m a pretty mean man when I get a rubber check.”

“Oh come on, Zack. I got to have a little cash. We’re all out of coal and you know I can’t get coal without cash.”

Zack cashed it, mostly to get the pestilential brood out of his store. He just couldn’t stand to have that grimy bunch of kids fingering everything in sight.

Monday, February 20

Even though Harry never opened up until ten in the morning, Zack spent almost the entire hour after he opened his own place peering through the backward lettering on his window at the bank across the street. If Otto’s check was no good, he would drive out there that very night and either take it out of the oily bum’s hide or attach his team, which was the only thing he had worth attaching.

At eleven o’clock Zack hung a sign on his door, “Gone to lunch,” and went over to the bank.

It had been such a slow morning that Zack was sure he hadn’t missed seeing Harry come, but still he could not believe it when he found the door locked, Harry had had colds before, but he had always sent his wife down to keep the bank open. Zack went down to Herman Schlaht’s store.

“Where’s Harry?” he demanded.

“How should I know?” Herman retorted. “Maybe he ain’t gonna run a bank no more. You ain’t worried are you? You got yours.”

“I just thought somebody might’ve been in that knew what happened to him,” Zack said angrily. “By God, I’ll just go on up there myself, right now.”

He stamped out of the store and headed around the corner and up the street. He glared at the empty window of the bank and turned and spat at its steps. The sidewalk ended at the end of the block. Then he walked on the edge of the road, past houses that had once been yellow or white or brown. All of them had columned front porches, gables jutting from their high roofs, and privies set squarely in line with their back doors. But they were not really so much alike as they looked. It was just that the same thing had happened to them all. They were like a double row of unfortunate sisters, who for different reasons all remained gray-haired spinsters, staring at each other wonderingly across the frozen street.

In the yard of one house a swing hanging from the branches of a great bare tree played by itself in the wind. In another yard a privy door flapped and banged, and in still another, several paths from convenient approaches crossed to one of the town pumps.

There was only one house beyond the Goodmans’ to the north, but it was far out in a field and not on the street. That was where the Finleys lived, and Zack saw, as he approached Harry’s house, that Mrs. Finley had already got a big Monday morning wash out, to freeze stiff in the wind. He didn’t see how that Finley outfit stayed alive in that big old leaking house. Harry, being the money-grubber that he was, actually demanded rent for the place. Harry owned it the way he owned all the other places, because of a no-good mortgage.

Harry’s own house was set in a yard so full of trees that, living or dead, bare or leafed, they nearly hid it from people passing by. Zack’s knock, muted by his glove, drew no response. He took off the glove and rapped again with the sharpness of his cold knuckles. He twisted the door knob, but it would not turn. Then he kicked the door.

He tramped down the path to the garage. The doors were locked, but he found a window draped with spider webs and dotted with the dry husks of insects. He could see that the car was not there. He heaved himself up the steps of the back porch, and yanked at the screen door, which opened so cordially that he nearly lost his balance. But the porcelain knob on the back door was as resistant as the brass knob on the front door.

He shouted into the house and pounded on a window. He stood for a moment, his glove cupped around his goiter, while he thought. Then he lunged around the house and up the steps of Harry’s neighbor.

Old Mrs. Webber came to the door. She shivered in her long black woolen dress and clutched her shawl around her age-deformed shoulders. “Come in, come in,” she said in a high voice that scratched something in her throat. Zack’s glove went back to his goiter.

“It’s so cold. Come in, so I can shut the door. Martin’s in bed today. His laig and his hip is hurting him. What did you want?”

“Where’s the Goodmans?” Zack shouted. “When did they go away? Have they cleared out for good?”

“I never see nobody in the wintertime,” Mrs. Webber mourned, and her voice scratched on something a notch or two higher. “Just the boy that brings me the groceries and goes down to the pump and fetches me my water. And that old man with the big blue lip that brings the coal.” Mrs. Webber no longer remembered names.

“Them Goodmans haven’t never been neighborly to us,” she went on, and her voice went back down and scratched in the first notch. Listening to it was like watching an old cow bend her head to the side and rake her neck up and down against a knot on a fence post. “Martin says that’s the way them Jews are. When they first come here I went over and called on the missus and took her an angel food cake—angel food—with twelve egg whites. They’s a lot of people in this town said I used to make the best angel food cake in the county. But that was before my wrists got too sore to beat it right any more.”

“But what about the Goodmans!” Zack cried.

“Why, do you know what she brought back in the dish I took her that cake in? Six rotten little fish! Martin said that would learn me to give something free for nothing to a Jew. We give them fish to the dog.”

“Did you see them go away?”

“Are they gone away?” Mrs. Webber asked.

“They’re gone all right! Their car’s gone.”

“Well, I swan,” said Mrs. Webber. “Never even said goodby. Just like a Jew.”

Zack ran all the way back to Herman’s store, clumping ponderously down the middle of the road, keeping his arms crossed to steady all the burning, jumping things inside his chest.

“He’s gone all right,” he cried to Herman. “Cleared right out. I said he would, didn’t I?”

Johnny Koslov, the youngest of the Koslov brothers, loitered in the rear of the store, hopelessly eyeing a horse blanket that he coveted for the bed of himself and his Hilda. He came forward to the counter and demanded, “Who iss gone? Who iss it?”

“The banker’s gone—that’s who!” Zack roared. “The little Jew banker. Just like I said he would!”

“Oh my!” said Johnny. Johnny had never had any money in the bank and he had not heard about the panic, but he could react to sounds in voices and looks on faces. “Oh my!” he said again.

Zack paid no more attention to him. He despised all Russians. “You find me a Roosian with any brains,” he would say, “and I’ll prove to you he’s probably got German blood in him. And they’ll stand around in your place and spit their filthy-dirty Roosian peanuts anywhere they feel like it—just like they act at home!”

Herman didn’t care about the sunflower seed husks. When he got around to it, he swept them out the front door onto the sidewalk, where they eventually sifted away between the boards. It didn’t bother him when the Russians gathered around his stove, chattering in their foolish language and blowing the salty slivers from their muscular lips. As long as the Russians spent money, Herman didn’t care how many Russian peanut shells they spat.

Herman had dust from a sack of chicken mash in his apron, and he beat at it, raising a yellow cloud that settled over the hairs on his hands. He dangled one of the hands in a small vat of dill pickles and brought up half a pickle which he put in his mouth. “You reckon he’s gone for good?”

“Well, now then, just what do you think?” Zack sneered.

“Why, he might just be taking one of them bank holidays,” Herman said. “He maybe will come back when the new President comes in.”

Herman had learned how to handle Zack Hoefener in twenty years of running a store in the same town with him. “You make me sick,” Zack said. “We should go after him with a rope. We should have a good old-fashioned necktie party.”

“You cannot hang a businessman for losing all his money,” Herman observed. “Or for taking a holiday, either.” He was not exerting himself to be fair to Harry but only to infuriate Zack, who flung open the door and charged through it, nearly ramming into the customer on Herman’s steps.

“What ails him?” George Custer said, holding the door open and leaning out to watch Hoefener’s departure.

Herman crunched the last of the pickle into his mouth and said to George, “He just found out about the bank.”

“What bank?”

“Harry’s bank. He closed it up.”

“What do you mean!”

“He went away. Nobody knows where.”

George took a long breath. “The dirty little Jew,” he said. “The stinking tight little Jew. Who in hell did he lend the money to? The stingy scoundrel must’ve lost it himself! The dirty little swindler!”

George paced to the stove in three enormous strides, and had no more than stuck his cold hands over its searing top than he whirled and paced back again.

The Adam’s apple in George’s neck sawed up and down. “Maybe he’s just took a holiday,” Herman suggested.

“A holiday!” George shouted. “A holiday! Yeah, out to California, maybe, where it’s nice and warm—and far away! Well, he damn well better stay wherever he’s at. It’ll be plenty warm around here for him, you bet!”

“If he took money that is not his the police will catch him, won’t they?” Herman said.

“Sheriff Richard M. Press!” George scoffed. “He’s just after the little guy that can’t hire himself a shyster lawyer. Oh, the Goddamned little chiseler! He’ll go scot-free!”

Herman shrugged. He himself stood to lose nothing. His only capital was the inventory on his shelves; his reserve was his own corpulence—a product of the tempting shelves and a margin that could well last him for many days should the shelves go empty.

He was curious to know how much George would lose, for it was obvious that he was going to lose something, but Herman would never ask a question like that to a man like Custer. George’s great frame alone was formidable, but the frame housed a violence of soul vastly more formidable than that of flesh. No room into which George stepped was free from tension until he left it again.

“Maybe Harry will come back after Roosevelt gets in,” Herman said.

“Roosevelt!” George pronounced the “Roo” as in kangaroo. “He’s nothing but another rich man. He don’t care if a few million of us lose our shirts. What’s he care about a little dinky one-horse bank way out here? There ain’t a thing he could do anyhow.”

He turned away and stared toward the back of the store, with his jaw as hard as ever, but with his eyes drifting out of focus in a peculiar way—almost like a fellow Herman had known who had a case of the falling sickness. It was queer how mean George looked that way. He wasn’t looking at anything at all, and yet he seemed ready to kill anything he might see.

Finally he said, “Better get this stuff for the old lady, I reckon.”

He bought a hundred-pound sack of flour and some little things for which he paid in exact change and bills so limp they felt more like silk than paper. Herman wondered how long those bills had ridden around in Custer’s hip pocket before he had to use them. And he wished he knew how much George had lost in Harry’s bank.

George couldn’t even look up at the house of his wife’s father as he passed below it on the road. He wondered how much the old man was going to lose. He wanted to go up and tell Will about the bank, but he was so angry he couldn’t trust himself. Why had he listened to the sanctimonious ass telling him all about how safe that God-damned bank was? Now the money he’d been saving for seed was gone, and he was sure it was gone for good. Yet he could hardly believe his luck could be so bad. He had thought losing the foal was enough bad luck to last for the next year at least.

He drove the last half mile to his own mailbox and turned into the frozen ruts that led through his fields to the farmyard. The land sloped away from the county road so that he could survey nearly all of the half section as he coasted down the quarter-mile incline to the house. On either side of him were his two biggest fields—eighty acres apiece—which he planted in wheat. These two fields stretched the entire width of the property, and their eastern edges cut the farm in half. The north and south windbreaks of well-grown willows, cottonwoods, and box elders defined the limits of the yard. The groves stopped the wind enough so that the snow was encouraged to settle between them, and thus the Custers paid for their bit of shelter from one element by spending the winter half-buried in another element.

Below the house the long swell dropped more precipitously to a trough of the lowest ground on the farm, and then rose again to form the eastern, rougher part of the property—humped, notched by ravines, and quite rocky. Here George had plotted out his pastures and the fields where he grew corn and a hay crop of sweet clover or alfalfa.

Set just above the final drop of the western swell, the house appeared to command the hill and the buildings at the foot of it. But the appearance was deceptive, for those who lived in the house were really commanded by the hill. Nearly everything went down the hill empty and came up the hill full. Water buckets, milk pails, egg baskets, and wheelbarrows went lightly down to the well or the barn or the chicken house or the compost pile and came wearily back up to the wash boiler, the cream separator, the cooler, or the garden behind the house. Once each morning and evening the milk pails went down full—after the cream was separated and the skim milk went back to the barn to feed the calves and pigs.

The house had begun as one big room with an east and a west window and a chimney on the north. Then smaller rooms had been leaned against the north and south sides of the first one, each with a window to the west. The kitchen stove, the shelf for the water bucket and wash basin, a cupboard, a cooler, and a small work table nearly filled the room on the north. The baby’s crib and Lucy’s cot and a large storage closet filled the room on the south. It was such a simple little house that George felt as though he confronted the inside as well as the outside every time he came down toward it from the western fields and saw the three windows looking up at him—one from each of the three rooms.

In the main room, which they called the dining room, was an expandable round table on which the family ate all its meals, wrote letters, bathed the baby, did homework, cut out paper dolls, butchered, sewed, or spread out catalogs for ordering garden seeds, repair parts, shoes, and clothes. There were four straight chairs around the table, and a high chair. There was a heavy rocking chair covered in black leather, scraped full of furry brown scratches and showing brown rings on the seat made by the springs pressing up through the stuffing. There was an expensive upright piano, a bookcase too small for the books in it, and a clothes rack beside the round heating stove, nearly always hung with diapers and baby blankets. In an alcove curtained off from the rest of the room was the double bed for himself and Rachel.

As George neared the house he looked out once more across the fields. He loved and hated them for the same reason: They represented the hope of independence that grew drier and dustier every year. It was bad enough not to own the land he worked, but it was intolerable to pay rent on that land to a city man—a city man who knew enough about buttons and thread and cheap toys from Japan to make money running a store full of junk, and who thought, since he had made the money to buy land which had sold for taxes, that he also knew how to make money with that land. No matter how much surplus wheat was left over from last year or what plagues of drought, disease, and grasshoppers were predicted, he stipulated that George must plant half the acreage in wheat, of which he took a full third of the proceeds—not of the gross, but the net, after threshing, transporting, and all other costs except a percentage of the seed price were borne by George. If George chose not to plant half the land in wheat, he had to make up in cash for what Mr. James T. Vick figured would have been his share.

George had counted on getting a small loan from Harry for this season. Prices the last September had been the lowest in history, and he had got twenty-six cents a bushel from the elevator, minus the penalty for smut. Out of that he had had to pay threshers. Nevertheless, he had managed to keep nearly two hundred dollars in the bank, and another hundred would have seen him through in fairly good shape. But now he would have to go to the office of that city man in Jamestown, pushing his way between the gaudy counters of junk and squeezing through a doorway half blocked by more cartons of junk, and feeling his ignominious way up the few dark stairs leading to the office of Mr. James T. Vick. It was a low, cluttered little balcony where Mr. Vick sat at his desk, which overflowed with the business of a half dozen enterprises, looking out over the store from time to time to see that no hands went from alluring counter to threadbare pocket. His change-girl and bookkeeper sat at a desk nearly touching his, loading coins into the spherical bottoms of the money carriers, screwing them into the heads mounted on the wires, and yanking the handles to send them back to the clerks waiting below. George would have to sit in the presence of that girl while the frenetic carriers hissed back and forth, clanging into the steel rings that snapped shut around them. They arrived with the solid assurance of money come home—money rushing, rushing to come home. And while the girl doled out coins and smoothed bills and stored them away, George would have to beg for cash so he could get in the spring crop. And he would put up, as the only security he had, his muscles and his hope.

He was home—with his good news. He stopped the car near the house, threw the tanned hide from one of his own steers over the heated radiator, and then wedged a rock beneath each of the front wheels. He ought not to have been able to see more than the windows and the roof of the car. It should have been buried in three feet of snow while he drove a sleigh over the white depths that would leave a little water in the ground and at least protect the fields from blowing. He thought of the snows when he was a boy—twenty-foot drifts in some places, packed dirt-hard. He even had a photograph of himself on his pony atop a drift so high that his head was higher than a telegraph pole. And in the spring the snow went back up into the sky and fell again in rain, and the wheat sent long threads of roots down to the water, and in the fall one bushel of Number One wheat would buy a pair of overalls. A farmer got a fair shake then, and a man who was willing to work hard and who used his brains could manage to buy the land he worked and build a fine big house for his family, like Will, or like his own father, whose farm had been clear till he mortgaged it again in order to speculate. But then Hoover had come along as Food Administrator during the war and pegged the price of wheat at $2.18 a bushel while he let the overall manufacturers hike their prices till they were getting $6.50 for a pair of cockeyed denim pants. Ah, yes! The Great Humanitarian, putting a ceiling on wheat because of the hungry people in the world. But just who cared what it cost the man who grew the wheat to put a pair of overalls over his naked rump? Who cared? That was what George wanted to know.

He scooped up the hundred-pound sack of flour as though he would let the Great Humanitarian have the whole hundred pounds right in his crabbed little face. All a man had to do was buy a sack of flour to see who kept right on making money—who shed none of the sweat and made all the money. Since 1929, in less than four years, wheat prices had fallen over sixty per cent. But retail flour had dropped only forty per cent and bread had dropped less than twenty-five per cent. The more middlemen there were to get their sticky mitts on the wheat he raised, the less of a drop in price there was; yet he was the only fellow who had to sweat. Every single time he bought a sack of flour he thought about what Adolph Beahr took at the elevator, then what the railroad took to carry the wheat to the mills in Bismarck or Grand Forks and then to bring the flour back to Herman Schlaht, and finally what Herman took for his share.

When George bought back his own wheat, sold from the harvest fields at a price that scarcely more than paid the threshers and the rent to James T. Vick, he bought it back at a price that made him wonder how much longer his family could even eat bread—yes, how much longer a wheat farmer could eat bread.

And now another city man—a dirty little Jew—undoubtedly had run off with the money George had hoarded all winter for putting in the new crop and buying staples until the next harvest. If he could have got that Jew banker’s neck between his hands at that moment before he had to go into his dark little house to break the news to Rachel, he could have throttled him. He could have watched without remorse while the face turned black above the white grip of his bare hands, and the legs kicked and dug at the frozen ground and then grew limp. And then, when he saw it was done, he could have unwrapped his fingers from the wrung neck, dropped the body, and left it behind him while he walked toward his house and wiped his hands free of corruption on his overpriced “Oshkosh B’Gosh” overalls.

Still trembling with his vision, he stamped his boots on the porch to signal Rachel to open the door.

“What happened?” she gasped, when she saw his face.

“That dirty little Jew has closed the bank.” He pulverized the words with his teeth, letting them drop down to her like chaff dropped by a whirlwind.

Like chaff they blew about her and suffocated her. It took her a moment to put them together. “Oh, he couldn’t have closed it permanently. He couldn’t have. It must just be that he was getting too much of a run and he wanted to stop it. They don’t close just because there’s no money left; they close to protect the rest of us.”

He looked down at her, the sack of flour still squeezed in his arms. “You and your father!” he shouted. “Preaching, preaching! Always preaching! Leave the money in there! If everybody would just leave it in there. Then the banks could loosen up and help out the little fellow again. Oh yes! Just have faith! Support the filthy banks and they’ll be able to help the little guy.”

His tone shifted from fire to ice. “Every one of those damned ignorant Roosians got their money out, if they ever had any in there in the first place. And so did the Germans. Zack Hoefener and Herman and Beahr—they won’t lose anything! You can bet on that. But it was up to us—up to the people that built the country to keep it going. You and your old man! Preaching. Going to church. By God, anybody knows you can’t trust a Jew. That’s what I told you all along!”

Rachel turned back to her bread, hoping he would stop before he woke up the baby. She rarely defended herself or her family when he was like this. She wanted her silence to make him feel that he had won, but instead it defeated him. It left him alone, with his anger gone, to hear again the things he had said, without so much as one culpable word of hers to recall and cling to in his search for justification. He had to bear the guilty aftermath of his rages all by himself. Still he couldn’t stop.

“Well, your old man will get just what he asked for now! He’ll lose a hell of a lot more than we will. I’ll just bet he won’t drop his damned holy tithe in that collection plate next Sunday!”

The table and floor creaked with the rhythmic strong pressure Rachel applied to the bread as she turned and folded it on the board, hauling up the dough and bending it back into itself with a little thump and a whisper of the flour on the wood.

He carried the sack past her and set it on the floor by the lard can they used for a flour bin. It stood beneath the window that looked out on the fields that made the wheat. The frost from the night before had melted and moistened the windowsill, making it smell of old wood and the dust from fields. Some of the wetness darkened the streaked pea-green calcimine on the wall below the window.

He took a penknife out of his pocket and cut the linked red and white strings hanging from the top edge of the sack. He lifted the sack and dumped it carefully into the empty can. He pinched the bottom corners of the bag and shook it to spill the last ounce out of the sides of it, and then he replaced the lid of the can and folded up the sack and laid it on top of the lid. The flour-dulled picture of the girl on the sack looked up at him.

“Dakota Maid,” her grayish-black braids hanging stiffly to her breasts, held out to him a great basket heaped with golden sheaves of wheat. Her too-dainty moccasins were planted much too close together to balance the weight she carried, and her dusty brown face was stretched in a wide Anglo-Saxon smile. The outline of the same improbable Indian maid showed ever so faintly through the faded dye of the curtains at the window.

George straightened up and looked at Rachel. She did not look at him. She held up one end of the dough until it thinned itself out, sliced off a length with the butcherknife, kneaded it into shape, and laid it in the first of the five waiting pans. She filled the other four pans and punched down the dough.

He couldn’t believe it. Surely it must matter to her that they had lost two hundred dollars. Surely she was not going to let him bear the loss alone. Surely she would say something that would commit herself to him. She would express her fear over what would become of them, thus admitting that now they had no choice but to survive together or fail together—admitting that she could not get along without him. She would begin to cry, because of the world’s enormous treachery; he needed to see her cry because he needed to cry himself. And her crying would also be an admission of her weakness and a sign that he would have to be strong for both of them—and he needed the sign in order to be strong enough. Or possibly she would burst into the kind of fury he longed for—the fury that would justify his own fury, and bring them once more together in furious righteousness. What was a wife for? Even if she would simply strike back at him with all the fury she must feel about everything (For she must feel it? She must!), as he had only now struck at her—even then it would be a kind of commitment. What was a wife for, if she let a man bear a thing like this alone?

But though she worked beside him as hard as he worked, all day, every day, and submitted to him silently in the night, she was no longer committed to him. Sometimes he knew why little things went wrong; sometimes he didn’t. He hadn’t the least notion of why the whole thing had gone wrong. If a piece of machinery misbehaved, he watched and listened and tinkered till he found the cause of the trouble, and then he set about fixing it calmly and competently. He was contemptuous of the sort of man who kicked an ailing machine. A machine had no will to defy the man. Why should the man feel emotions about the machine? But it was things like this that made him want to kick something—things like these grievances of hers that went round and round till they lost their beginnings—these grievances that were more important to her than the ruin of them both. An overpowering heat flooded down his legs, as though he was wetting himself in a nightmare. He knew that if he kicked the streaked green wall under the window, he could put his foot right through it.

He hadn’t intended to do it, but once he had the door open, he was afraid he might rip it out of the kitchen—to make her look up from the everlasting little chores that she found so convenient to pile up between them—nevertheless, he had specifically told himself that he would not do it; but when the door was in his hands he did slam it with all his strength. Once again she had won.

Rachel had no idea that she had won. Cathy began to fuss almost as soon as the noise ended. She was that kind of baby. Lucy had been that way too. Some babies, when they first woke, would lie and look up at the ceiling with their wide eyes that seemed never to have been asleep, and they would speak softly to themselves with their tiny soft mouths for a long time before they decided they were hungry. But not her babies. They were like George. The minute they woke they wanted up, whether they were hungry or not. They couldn’t wait for anything. They couldn’t even wait to be born; both of them came nearly two weeks early.

Now Cathy was hungry and Rachel would have to feed her very soon. She considered the bone-colored dough. The loaves needed to rise before going into the oven; on the other hand, she was afraid they might rise too much before she had finished with the baby. If she forgot them for too long, the bread would bake out too airy and dry, with a bubbly crust. If she punched them down again right now, they might not rise enough, and then the bread would be heavy and doughy. George had a fit over faulty bread. At every meal while a bad batch lasted, he would wonder aloud how it was that his mother had always been able to bake perfect bread.

Once she had thought that doing her best to please him would be a joy to her, as it had always been one of her greatest joys to please her father. But now, even if he complimented her, she could not help thinking of the crushing ratio between complaints and compliments. Why, then, did it matter whether a batch of bread ever pleased him again or not?

She came upon the question the way she occasionally came upon a serpent as she was starting the garden in the cold spring. The snake, barely sentient after sleeping so long in the frozen ground, would finally become aware of her and uncoil like a rubber band snapping beneath her hand. And even while she was trying to calm the ridiculous physical reaction she always had when this happened, she was saying to herself, “But I was looking at it all the time! I saw it right there, all the while it was so still!”

So it was with the question. Now that she had seen it, she knew how long it had been there, and she knew that, unlike the snake, it would never go away and let her calm herself again. She would live always with this astonished burning in her chest. The baby’s crying, she thought, the bank, the baby, your father! always preaching! I don’t care, I won’t ever care again.

The baby was hungry. She must feed her. But she didn’t want to be crying while she fed her. That wasn’t good for a baby, to be held and fed while the mother was upset. The bank, the bank, the bank, and why should it matter any more either? It was not going to matter any more. Neither were his shouts.

She remembered how he had been that first year when he was courting her—in his way. His father’s farm adjoined the schoolyard and that was why they had met at all. It was a glorious Indian summer day. She had wanted to eat her lunch outside with the children, but she had to write a geography lesson on the blackboard.

The sounds of calamity sent her rushing to the door. Except for the big boys, the children were flying toward her in terror. Behind them, on the safe side of the Custer fence, stood the big boys, yelling with laughter. A huge Holstein bull fanatically assaulted the other side of the fence. They bellowed and raged at him; they flapped their arms and danced back and forth. One boy took off his shirt and waved it, leaping about in his underwear.

“Boys!” she cried. “Boys!”

She ran out to them, conscious even at such a moment of how short she was beside them, and said all the wrong things.

“Put your shirt on! Get away from that fence! What did you do to him? He could have killed all of you!” They laughed like demons. They showed off for her.

Then the bull, butting at the fence post, hooked a horn under the bottom wire, raised his head, and pulled the post out of the ground.

She didn’t need to tell them to run. They were all far ahead of her, stringing across the schoolyard and pounding up the steps. She had a memory of the giant bull face, twice the size of a cow’s, of the great wall of bone that was his forehead and of the two shining black globes in it, rolling, seeking—glittering as they came to focus on her, seeing her as she would look under his hoofs after the fence came down. She remembered the black leather nose, no more bothered by the ring in it than a boot is bothered by a bootlace. She remembered the blunt profile, descended of Ice Age bison and Grecian bulls—the head, created like those others, to be nothing more than a senseless battering-ram proceeding from an enormous, obscenely male neck.

She remembered, too, how the last boy had slammed the door of the schoolhouse in her face and she had thought, he’s locked me out, and even in her fear, as she ran up the steps, she was furious at this trick to compound her humiliation. Were they going to make her beg to be let in, with a three-thousand-pound bull behind her? But the door was not locked; the boy had only slammed it out of his own fear. Much later, after they were all safe again, she felt hurt that they would not have thought of her at all. Males, she said to herself when the hurt came.

The bull, in his epitome of male savagery, charged to the steps and stopped. Now there was nothing for him to attack with his aroused maleness. He seemed to know that he was ludicrous and to be further enraged. He shook his head at the bottom step, but there was nothing soft and alive to gore. He bellowed steadily. When he saw the children moving at the window he rammed his skull into the wall below.

The bristling flame of a red-haired human head appeared in the window then—the head of a man whose profile pushed out and down from his red pelt with an impatient force of elongated brutish angles. The mouth was long-lipped and excessively arched, and the jaw, instead of ending properly in a civilized chin, jutted out and down as though it never intended to stop. Altogether it was the face of a cave man.

But then when she looked down to see all of him at once, she discovered that the jawline was remarkably straight and that it led back up to an ear that was large but refined. Nor was the skull that of a flat-headed cave man, for it was high and curved behind, and it balanced the jutting jaw on the slender prideful neck. The neck was set on wide shoulders, the shoulders on a potent torso. The torso supported mighty limbs. Then she saw that the face was not that of a male human throwback, but of a young man so overpowering that before she could stop it, the thought quickened and created itself: He looks exactly the way a man ought to look.

He moved carefully but fearlessly, scolding the bull in curiously soothing tones. Either the bull was very much afraid of the man, or else he was no longer so enraged as he pretended he was, and glad to be persuaded to stop smashing his head into the school building. With not more than a minute of quick footwork on the part of the man and half-hearted dodging on the part of the bull, the capture was done. The man had his lead stick hooked in the ring and the bull followed, rocking his massive shoulders and haunches in a gait calculated to crowd the man. But the man had a great stride to match the bull’s, and he kept the leather nostrils stretched into such painful ovals that the bull could not side-step to dislodge the hook. The man never looked behind him. He marched away over the flattened fence, with his straight back no more than four feet in front of the glittering eyes and the cruel secret brain.

The more logical it was to stop trembling, the more difficult it seemed to stop. The big boys took up the siege where the bull had left off. Even after she finally got them to sit down and ostensibly to work, the atmosphere in the one big room, grown stuffy and confining with the warm day, was that of a becalmed ship alive with the vibrations of mutiny. If she asked a question, she was more likely to get an uncontrolled burst of laughter than an answer. She knew they couldn’t be blamed for thinking it was funny to see a teacher run away from a bull—even if it was for her life. What she blamed them for was starting the whole thing—wandering far into a pasture where they had no business and getting an animal worked up like that.

When the man came back to fix the fence, she was grateful and yet angry. Why did he keep such an animal in such a flimsy fence? She could not stop being aware of him out there, digging, pounding, nailing, with the sun glinting on his red-gold arms. Once when she looked out the window, her heart beating with the remnant of her fright and with her exasperation over the laughing savagery of the disobedient males ranged in front of her, she saw the man resting, leaning his arm across the new post, gazing at the schoolhouse, and then laughing until he finally had to blow his nose. He must be crazy, she thought.

After school he came in. She saw his inches of crinkly red hair rub the top of the door. He introduced himself politely enough, but then he said in a severe deep voice, “Now then, Miss Shepard, that was our prize bull out yonder in the breeding pasture.” He did not apologize by his tone or his expression for speaking the words “bull” and “breeding” to a young woman. “In the future we’ll have to ask you to enjoin your pupils from trespassing on our property. After all, it is a schoolteacher’s duty to be responsible …” A belly laugh that rolled from him as though he were a Barnum and Bailey bass drum put an end to the speech he had been working on all afternoon.

He saw me run, she thought, and hated him.

He was often near the school when it let out, and particularly, it seemed, when she needed him. Once her little Ford got snowed in during the day and he pushed her out of the bank. But just as she could feel the wheels getting traction again, the car started to make a dreadful, sharp, rapid thumping. She stopped and let the engine idle. The trouble didn’t seem to be there. Cautiously she let the car move and again the thumping resounded. It was in the back and she got out to see if it was the bumper. But nothing seemed amiss, and she thanked George again for his help, while he stood inclining his head to her with a respectful hand on the bill of his cap. She climbed back into the car and started it once more. This time the banging shook the whole automobile.

She leaned out and called, “Do you suppose it’s the transmission?”

“Could be. Sounds like she’s all froze up somewheres, don’t she?” he said. (She had noticed that he talked much less grammatically when he wasn’t making a speech he had prepared just for her. She found the contrast amusing and foolishly flattering.)

She couldn’t remember any more how many times she started the car and stopped it again in annoyed confusion before his wild laughter gave him away. He was so good with machinery that he knew just how his hands beating on a rear fender ought to sound. After they were married, she had seen him run stooping behind a car as visitors started to leave their yard, playing the awful tattoo, and she knew, by the way their faces looked, how she must have looked herself. His jokes almost always made her feel stupid, and therefore irritated with him, and yet, as the year went on, she was ever more restless on the weekends she spent at home. Sunday afternoons were endless, even though she could play the piano she missed so much all week. Finally she began to be irritated with him because her Sunday afternoons were so dull and empty.

All the while she kept wondering how she was supposed to feel, and how she did feel, and what the truth was about various sorts of physical mysteries. There was the way her body vacillated between an energy so great that she had no peace and could not even digest her food and a lassitude so profound that she had no will and did not care at all what happened to her. And there were more subtle and complicated physical mysteries which caused a recurrence of the shocked feelings she had had about her father when she first knew some things had to be true, as they were true of all men.

Now all she knew was that the feelings of that year, whatever they were, whatever love was, had resulted in a wedding as soon as school ended. All she knew now was that there had been a roomful of bad boys, Sunday afternoons when she was nearly paralyzed by her need for some unknown thing, a snowbank, a snowbank—the bank, the bank, the bank. This must have been a love story and now this must be the end of it. She knew more than she thought she knew. She knew, after all, what love was and how it ended.

The baby was screaming in hunger and outrage. Rachel wondered if some accident had happened while she stood in the kitchen staring at five pans of bread dough through tears that would not stop. Did the baby have a pin scratching her stomach or stuck in her throat? She was afraid even to go and look at the baby.

A few nights before, she had gone to cover Lucy and seen what she could not put out of her mind. The child labored with a heavy cold, and her body was twisted, her head straining back at a broken angle from her neck, while she fought her loud unconscious battle for air. Her braids had come undone and her long hair streamed across her face, covering it in the darkness as hair covered the faces of dead children flopping in their mothers’ arms or gaping in the gutters of Spanish streets. The picture was sometimes static, sometimes moving. Sometimes Rachel saw how it happened to one after another in the procession of mothers carrying dead children. One had looked out her window just as the bomb fell or the grenades exploded or the men, appearing from nowhere, opened fire in the street. This mother would have seen the child fall but she would not have been able to reach it in time. Nevertheless, when she got to its side, she would know how it had been—how her little girl of six had borne alone this agony still on her face, had wondered why her mother didn’t come to explain what was happening to her and to save her from it—for here, on the child’s face, was the terror and grief of dying all by herself.

The next mother did not know; she was searching, but of course this tiny body here was not what she had set out to find, not what she would allow herself to find. The hair tangled over the face hid the features, but this was her shoe, her dress, her jacket. But this was not her hand, no, this was not her face. Another little girl had died here when the men threw the things in the street. But here, under the blood, this was her dimple. (Lucy had dimples, round and sudden now, like pin pricks, but when she grew up they would be deep short lines at the corners of her mouth, like George’s. But no, she would not grow up, for here, under her hair, was the place the blood had come from.)

This, this was the way love stories ended. Husbands killed each other in the streets and wives went out and picked up their babies. Banks failed, nations died, babies starved—this was a fine world, wasn’t it, that men had built to live their love stories in?

Her own baby was screaming. The procession of mothers sank into the weary blackness beneath her mind and the blackness snapped back a maddening primitive retort. Life goes on, it said. Why? she retaliated. Why?—the silly question prompted by the awkward assertions one’s foolish instincts were always making. George for instance, like all males, had absolutely no reasons except those of his instincts for anything he did. That was why it didn’t occur to him not to go on, even now, when they were so obviously ruined.

She had not stopped shaking but she had stopped crying, so she wiped the flour from her hands and went in to pick up her baby.

Saturday, March 4

The drifts of the blizzard around the steps of the Eureka Bank were all undisturbed, so that it could as well have been tenantless for two years as two weeks. But not even having every other bank in the nation for company could make it look less lonely.

The President had closed them all. Harry Goodman’s Eureka Bank—assets $78,000, liabilities undetermined—was no more tightly closed than the biggest, oldest bank in New York. On that day the Eureka Bank was no more of a failure than any of the others with their good and bad mortgages and other kinds of good and bad paper.

The President’s inaugural address came over Herman’s radio in the forenoon, and the store was filled with men who had come to hear it. Some of the men had radios at home, but they came to Herman’s store anyway, so as to have company while they listened. Even George was there, standing far back against the shelves, not joining the men around the stove or the ones who leaned on the counter, hovering over the radio, so possessed by the voice in it that they forgot themselves and let their hopefulness and their anxiety show in their faces. George, standing apart from them all, ground his teeth and wondered how they could be so taken in. He didn’t like the phony accent and he didn’t like the highfalutin language and it was just too much when the President said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” By God, what rich man was going to accuse him of being afraid and get away with it, anyhow? He hardly heard any of the rest of the speech, he was so angry at being called afraid.

When the speech was over and the first murmurs began, he said loudly, “I’d like to get that hothouse pansy out on a farm for just one hour. I’d like to watch him pitch bundles into a thrashing machine when it’s around a hundred and ten in the shade—or wrastle a bull calf that’s taken a notion he just don’t want to grow up to be a steer!”

Zack Hoefener began to laugh, holding his goiter with his hand, as though he must not lose track of the upsetting vibrations of his laughter and his heart beating there. Otto Wilkes laughed too, and so did Wally Esskew and Lester Zimmerman. Even the Koslovs began to laugh, though George doubted that any of them could understand what was funny about giving a man with that accent the chore of emasculating a calf.

Clarence Egger, whose arm had been gobbled up by a threshing machine, waited for them all to stop. “Don’t you sheep brains know that the guy can’t even walk? He had infantile paralysis, for Christ’s sake!”

George was not going to be made a fool of by Clarence Egger. “Well, he got a great big infantile silver spoon, too, didn’t he?”

“I’ll take walking any day,” Clarence said. He was the only man in the room who dared, because his right arm was gone, to stand up to George. At times when he was drunk enough, Zack would do it, but nobody else ever did.

Nevertheless, George felt that they were displeased with him for making them laugh at a crippled man. God-damn them—they were so dumb and ignorant—always confusing the issue. The issue was that a rich man was telling them all not to worry even if they had just lost their last red cent to a little Jew banker. A rich man who couldn’t possibly imagine what it was like to work sixteen hours a day for six months of the year and to sit in a dark house smothering in snow for the other six months, wondering where the money for coal was going to come from. That was the man who was telling them not to worry, and that man’s coddled, polished ignorance was the issue—not whether or not the man could walk.

George considered himself a well-spoken man, but he had no words to substitute for the obscenities he wanted to say to these silly bleating sheep. Clarence Egger calling him a sheep brain. He put his hands on his hips and lifted his shoulders as though he would sashay into a wrathful jig and he roared the chorus of a bitter song —

Let them see, if they could, that this was their song unless things were radically changed. He shoved his way past them as he sang, and stamped out the door. He went on singing as he took the blankets off the horses and climbed on to the seat in the wagon box —

Sunday, March 12

By the time the President got around to making a speech on the radio about the banks, a good many of them had already reopened. He called his talk a “fireside chat,” and the image was not reassuring to George. “Chat” was an effete word, used either by women putting on airs or by wealthy people of either sex who had the time to waste in small talk while they sat around in parlors that bulged with bay windows hung in velvet and lace. A fireplace was an expensive luxury which added to the cost of heating a house by inviting down the chimney every prowling wind. The fireplace that came to George’s mind was accoutered with hundreds of dollars’ worth of brass, polished by some ill-paid servant. And over the mantel was an oil portrait of the Wall Street grandfather who made the fortune by speculating in Western land or by other questionable means.

“It is safer to keep your money in the reopened bank than under the mattress,” the President said.

“What money?” George cried to Rachel. “Another rich man in the White House. Oh, how they love to tell us how they know all about being poor. ‘You ah fahmahs. I am a fahmah, too!’ Oh, yes, he’s a farmer too! What a nice little farmhouse he has there at Hyde Park!”

George sat at his own fireside, a bearable distance from the plump round stove that blistered the air in a six-foot radius, and helplessly cursed Harry Goodman while the President urged the people to bring their money back to the banks. But George predicted that putting the bankers back in control of the country might not go so smoothly as the President thought it would, and sure enough, there was quite a piece in the paper just a few days later. He read it aloud to Rachel after supper, yelling out into the kitchen over the noise she made doing the dishes.

“Look here what happened down in Oklahoma,” he said. “I told you there was going to be bloodshed. Unless I miss my guess this is just the beginning. Fellow here—a state bank examiner—W. C. Ernest, his name was, was looking over the Citizens’ State Bank. Paper says he telephoned the State Bank Commissioner to come and take over the bank. Then it says, ‘As Mr. Ernest replaced the receiver of the instrument and turned to speak to the bank president, he was shot in the head and died instantly.’ Well, I tell you, it’ll get so the government don’t dare send out anybody on jobs like that any more. Or anyhow they won’t be able to find anybody that’ll go! You know how that fellow from Bismarck roared in and out of here when he came to clean out Harry’s bank. He knew his life wasn’t worth a plugged nickel around here! Who cares? Might as well hang as starve. You wait. It can’t help but start pretty soon.”

Most of the time Rachel believed he was only relieving his feelings by talking this way. But once in a while he worried her. “Who do you think is going to start it?” she called in.

“How should I know?” he said irritably. “Who ever knows who starts a revolution? It just starts, that’s all. Maybe the coal miners. Maybe the veterans … Hah! How do you like this? Right on the same page with this other story. President said he got ten thousand telegrams ‘applauding his bank policy.’ Well, that’s a little late for W. C. Ernest, isn’t it? I wonder if Roosevelt has heard about him yet.”

Thursday, March 23

The newly elected German parliament organized, held its first meeting, handed all its power over to the newly elected Chancellor for four years, and dissolved itself again. Almost everywhere new officials were taking over, they were doing drastic things. Wild Bill Langer, the new governor of North Dakota, proclaimed a moratorium on payments of farm mortgages and decreed that there must be no more forced sales of premises or personal property used for agriculture.

George thought about that decree while he rode behind his team, round and round an eighty-acre field, turning two furrows at a time. The governor swore he would call out the state militia to restrain the county sheriffs from carrying out sales. They were already having battles over the Minnesota governor’s proclamation to the same effect. George wondered if Langer would really follow through on what he’d said. Above all, he wondered if what Langer had said would carry any weight with Vick. According to Wild Bill Langer, Mr. James T. Vick would not be able to attach George Custer’s stock and equipment in order to collect rent. George did not propose to try to beat Vick out of his rent, but on the other hand, if Vick did not loan him the money to get in the crop, Vick would have everything to lose and nothing to gain, the way George saw it. After all, there were always just two ways for Vick ever to get his rent—out of a crop or out of George’s own possessions. Now there was supposedly only one—out of a crop. The more George thought about it, the more reasonable it was to expect that Vick would let him have the money.

Every day he plowed and figured. With his four-horse team and a two-bottom plow he could turn over four acres in a twelve-hour day. He could get by without plowing the other wheat field because he had plowed it last spring and it was loose enough just to disk and drag and seed. Even so, he had oats and corn and barley and hay to get in. He might have to get Ralph Sundquist over for a week or so with his team, and he would have to pay Ralph in cash because he didn’t have either goods or labor to trade for Ralph’s work.

On the last day of March the weather was unseasonably warm. This early in the year they were already falling behind their normal seasonal total of moisture. If it was going to be another drought year, he should get the crops in as soon as it was humanly possible in order to take advantage of what little moisture the winter had left behind. He decided he could no longer put off going to bargain with James T. Vick.

Will had been watching and hoping to catch George driving by alone in the car. He was just coming from the barn when he spotted the old Ford below on the road and he jogged down his driveway and flagged George to a stop. George did not turn off the engine; he couldn’t bear to be interrupted in a project—especially one that was so unpleasant to think about. Will found it even harder than usual to talk to him.

“Have you got a minute, George?” he asked.

“Just about that,” George said.

“Rachel’s mother and I—that is—I don’t know whether you lost money in the bank or not,” Will began, “but if you did, we’d like to let you have whatever you lost for as long as you need it. We’ve always kept an account in Jimtown. That is, I wish you’d ask us if you need help this spring, regardless … we … Rachel—might not need to know.” He saw that George was already angry and he wondered miserably what he had done wrong, besides telling a lie about a sizable Jamestown account.

His first four words had been wrong. George took them as an affront to him as a son-in-law. Why hadn’t Will said, “Rose and I”? Why “Rachel’s mother and I,” as though Rachel still belonged in her father’s tall house on the hill, not in his own?

“We’ll get the crops in, I reckon,” George said. “Much obliged.”

He shifted into gear and pretended not to hear Will shouting, “Well, now, you know where to come if you change your mind!”

Will walked back up the hill. His legs seemed uncommonly heavy. They made his toes come scudging into the ground at each step just an instant before he expected them to. He glanced up at the orchard, at the dead crab-apple tree over the box of money. He wondered if it was the pain in his belly that made his legs so heavy.

The thirty miles to Jamestown were gone before George had even begun to exhaust the choice words he might have said to Will or that he would like to say to James T. Vick. He had, in fact, spent the entire time assembling choice words, so that he found himself parking the car down the street from Vick’s store without any clear idea of what he was actually going to say.

He made his way past the disgusting counters, wondering if Vick was watching him from the balcony. He flinched as one of the little change carriers whizzed over his head, so close that he could feel its breeze parting his hair. A damned store for women.

He stood in the door of Vick’s office, holding his light summer cap in one hand, shaking Vick’s hand with the other.

“How’s the farm, Custer?” Vick shouted above the noise of the little cash carriers coming home.

“Still there, Mr. Vick,” George said.

He decided to make an oblique approach. He began while Vick cleared papers off a chair for him. “They say it’s going to be a bad grasshopper year, and the drought’s going to be bad, too, maybe. I think I ought to put in more hay this year—hay and pasture. No rust and smut to worry about; not so much pest damage; drought don’t hurt it so much; good for the land. If the hay don’t bring any price, maybe I could feed a couple-three more cows through the winter. Cream prices are going up a little.”

“Oh, no, Custer!” Vick burst in. “This is just the year for wheat. Government says the drought’ll have the prices way up—better than they’ve been for years. No, this is the year to plant wheat and get whatever we can.”

George had learned that an argument inevitably and quickly led to the same conclusion. Vick always confronted George with the same simple alternatives—George could obey or lose his lease. If George lost his lease, he would also lose all the improvements he had made. George knew that if Vick even got around to offering him those alternatives today, he would hit him. He started over. “I want to plant a new kind of seed this year. The money for it was in the bank. I never saved back any seed last fall. If I don’t put in a crop, I guess you don’t get any rent, do you? That is, if Langer sticks to his guns.” His hand was being forced too early in the game. With Vick he always found himself having to bet his chips before the draw.

Vick tilted back his swivel chair and smiled. He had big, oddly flat lips. When he stretched them to smile, George thought of the ragged strip of dull red rubber tied to a boy’s slingshot.

“Always burning your bridges, aren’t you, Custer? That’s no way to do business. Why didn’t you save some seed?”

“It’s useless to keep on planting Marquis year after year! The rust takes more of it every year. I figured last fall I might as well make the switch to Ceres this spring or—or just get out! The rust don’t bother Ceres and the smut couldn’t be any worse than it is in the Marquis, and the Ceres is supposed to take the drought better. I didn’t burn my bridges! I saved every dime I could toward this seed.”

“Did you actually have enough in the bank to see you through?”

God, how he hated the impertinent way the man had of pinning him down! Landlords! Vick was so lucky that nobody had killed him yet.

“I figured on a very small loan.” George never could lie.

“Well,” Vick said. He let his chair fall forward and bounce him out toward the file where he kept his claims on the sweat of men. “I think we can arrange for the seed.”

He pulled out George’s papers. He figured on scratch paper for a moment and then laid the paper on the edge of his desk, inclining a shoulder toward George to indicate that he should move his chair closer. George did not move his chair, but he leaned forward. Vick pointed with his pencil to his scattered bits of arithmetic, as though George would have trouble following him. George gritted his teeth.

“Here’s the way the deal works,” Vick said, in a tone he might have used in explaining the store’s policies to a new clerk. “Another sixty acres in wheat—that will still leave you a hundred for pasture and corn and hay.”

“How do you know how much hay and pasture I’ll need?” George cried. “It depends on how dry it is, for Christ’s sake! It depends on how soon I have to start feeding hay when the pastures give out!”

“Get rid of some stock.”

“I told you, the cream is what’s keeping us going! And I’ve got to have horses, for Pete’s sake. You want me to hitch my wife to the plow, maybe, like them Roosians used to do?”

“The hell with cream,” Vick said. “You and I don’t have any agreement about cream. I don’t care how much cream you sell. It’s wheat I care about. That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”

George’s heart shook his great chest under the denim jacket he had worn as an insult to Vick. He was very hot. His hands were slippery on the varnished arms of his chair. His hands were hungry, pleading to wrap themselves around a neck. He stood up.

“I can get along without your money, Mr. Vick,” he said. “I’ll put the crops in the way the lease stands now. A hundred and sixty acres of wheat. A third of the net to you. Good morning.”

He strode from the office and before he had taken three steps he knew he had got out just in time. A minute longer and he might have killed him.

On the way home he thought about Will’s offer. He would have to take him up on it now, or else get out. He would have to go to the one man he had vowed never to go to. And even after he had borrowed from his wife’s father, he still had to put up with the same galling agreement with Vick. Before, he had been running to stand still; now he was going in debt to stand still. Now he would be entirely dependent on what the Ceres and the fall prices did. If they let him down he would be hopelessly ensnared by two old men—James T. Vick and Will Shepard. It wasn’t right that the accident of birth should place one generation in a position of such power over another—just because they had been around to get when the getting was good. Will had cashed in on every good year since the beginning of the century. He had bought a section of choice land that had increased in value more than three hundred per cent in a decade, so that the original mortgage, which had once been so huge, had decreased to an almost insignificant percentage of the value of the farm. And then Will had paid off that mortgage with war-inflated dollars and with wheat prices five times what they had been when he bought the farm and a dozen times what they were again now, a dozen years later.

And where had he, George Armstrong Custer, been during those good years? Working for nothing on his father’s farm, that’s where. A boy in his late teens, already stronger than most men, doing more work than most men, thirsting to go to war, kept home by his father to raise the wheat that would win the war. Oh, yes, win the war, and make so much money for his father that the old man had felt rich enough to speculate with it and finally lose his shirt. He managed to lose it even before the crash, and then he managed to die from drinking a little too much Indiana Red Eye and leave a farm, mortgaged in inflated dollars, to the boys who had earned him the money that had made him feel so rich.

Then a very young schoolteacher had come to take the one-room school where he had gone himself. She had not the vaguest notion of how to make the big boys behave, and he had been amused by her helplessness. In fact, he had been infatuated by it. He had wanted to protect her, even though he had enjoyed teasing her himself.

He had married her, and moved off his father’s farm, leaving the financial wreck to his brothers. The next thing he knew, he was leasing a half section conveniently adjacent to the farm of his father-in-law. That was his life in a nutshell, he thought.

Yet all it took to succeed, if a man had been born at the right time, was a good piece of property, the strength to farm it profitably, and the sense to hang on to it, to get it free and clear, and to keep it that way. Then a man could get through the drought years; he could farm the way he wanted to. What did a man’s good farming sense count for if a city man made all the rules? But his father-in-law and his own father had been born at the right time. His own father had been a fool. His father-in-law had been a hard-working, conservative farmer. It was all that simple. And now Will Shepard was in a position to make loans to his son-in-law even when millions of solid citizens all over the country were finding themselves entirely wiped out.

When George got home it was nearly two in the afternoon. Rachel had just finished draining some soured curds from their thin pale yellow water.

“You haven’t eaten yet, have you?” she asked. “I’ll have this Dutch cheese ready in a minute. I can fry you some bread if you want it. I’m ready to bake this batch and the last of the old loaf is pretty dry.”

He looked at her standing before her cupboard, adding another dollop of cream, getting a clean teaspoon, tasting the cheese, sprinkling on a bit more salt, mashing it into the cheese. Her short, durable figure, built like her father’s, was clothed in a cotton print dress and an apron she had made herself. Her arms, bare below the short sleeves, were still tan from last summer. She never burned. He, on the other hand, never seemed to stop burning. And every winter he became white and vulnerable again. She did not look at him, pretending that the cottage cheese took all her attention. She was letting him choose exactly what and when to tell her, and her delicacy defeated him. It neutralized him, just as Vick had succeeded in neutralizing him. There was never anything to strike at.

He sat alone at the round table, looking down the hill toward the barn and chewing the food she put before him. The day was shot as far as accomplishing anything in the field went. He might as well let the horses rest for the afternoon. They needed it. If he hustled he could clean the barn in the time left before evening chores.

He mopped his plate with the last piece of bread until it was polished free of cheese and potatoes. He changed into his old overalls, put his rubber boots back on, pulled his cap hard on his head, and paused, with his cotton work glove on the doorknob. He opened his mouth again, but when he spoke it was only to bring up a small question concerning their daily existence.

“You can go over to fetch Lucy from school, can’t you?” he asked. “This job’ll take me right up to milking time.”

Why don’t you ask me now, he thought. Why don’t you say, “Well, how did it go? What luck did you have?”

Her failure to ask was another indication that she no longer cared what became of their future together. Her lack of curiosity was another sign of her lack of commitment to him. She did not ever ask to know what he was thinking.

“All right,” she said. “I need a few things at the store anyway, so I might as well go after her.”

He tipped her chin roughly in his glove and made her look at him. “I sure picked a swell time to get born, didn’t I? Twenty-five years sooner and I’d have cleaned up on wheat. Twenty-five years later and I’d have been chauffeured back and forth from school like Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

He banged the door against the weatherstripping and walked down to the barn. He did the cows’ stalls first because they were the most offensive to him. He never liked to put off a distasteful job, because he could not stop thinking about it till it was done. He didn’t mind the droppings in the horse stalls, for unless the smell became too concentrated, it was actually pleasant to him—rather like a faintly decaying hayfield, much distilled.

As he squeezed the handle of the shovel and lifted the mushy loads out of the cows’ trench he said over and over to himself, “That liver-lipped swindler will never know how close he came today. He’ll never know.”

How could an ignorant dime-store owner be expected to know anything about a new kind of wheat, anyhow? He was too busy buying celluloid dolls from Japan for a penny each and selling them for a dime. And then the Japs were using every American dollar they could get their hands on to buy guns to kill the Chinese. If nobody else on earth made a thing George needed, he would get along without it rather than buy anything that said “Made in Japan.” But a man who made his money selling celluloid dolls and supported Japanese aggressors who were slaughtering Chinese farmers and their families—that man was going to twit him about burning his bridges when he decided he had to change the seed he was planting.

Nobody in the vicinity was planting it yet, but they all would. He knew they would just as soon as they all saw how well the Ceres was going to do for him. It took a little guts to be first to try something, that was all.

For a long time Marquis had been the favorite of hard red spring wheat growers, but stem rust did more damage every year, as the rust spores became ensconced in a wider and wider area, and new varieties, traveling north on the rigs and clothing of the threshing crews, mixed with the old spores and grew strong through hybridization.

Rust and smut were the two ravaging diseases. Smutty wheat brought less from the millers because cleaning it was an expensive proposition, but at least there was some wheat to cut with the binder; smutty wheat wasn’t collapsed on the ground in red-brown broken stalks devoid of kernels. Seed wheat could be treated for smut, but nothing could stop rust except the kind of state-wide effort to wipe out its winter host—the barberry bushes—that the government would not make. So Ceres was George’s last hope. It was rust resistant and more drought resistant than Marquis. It had been developed at the North Dakota Experimental Station just a couple of years ago, and it ought to be right for North Dakota if any wheat was any more.

No brand of wheat was immune to wheat midges, sawflies, pink maggots, cutworms, leaf hoppers, plant lice, billbugs, army worms, black chaff, Hessian fly, chinch bugs, true wireworms, false wireworms, strawworms, jointworms, white grubs, or grain moths. And if the grasshoppers were bad enough they could strip the fields, as they had done a couple of times within his father’s memory, and the brand of wheat would not make any difference at all to them, either. Moreover, Ceres and Marquis were equally vulnerable to dust storms and wind. Hail, or even a hard rain, would dislodge the hardening kernels during their maturing weeks, and the kind of seed he had planted wouldn’t make any difference at all.

But after the way his Marquis had surrendered to rust last summer, George had made up his mind never to plant it again. He had simply sold every bushel he harvested and decided that one way or another he would find the money for the new seed when the spring came. Now spring had come, and he was left with exactly one place to get the money. He squeezed hard on the shovel handle again. The man he had sworn never to go to for help—the man he had cut off this very morning.

He pushed the wheelbarrow down the aisle and laid a row of planks from the barn door to the manure pile across the slushy barnyard. That morning the ground had been hard with thickly frosted ridges outlining the hoof prints in the mud of yesterday’s thawing, and water had been frozen in the deeper tracks. Tomorrow morning it would be the same. Spring came reluctantly to this northern place, but it was here, nevertheless.

Ceres, goddess of growing things, was the name that had been in his mind all winter long. No more Marquis, that debilitated aristocrat which bled so easily that he could lose up to fifty per cent of his crop in a bad rust year. Ceres, after all, was of the family of aristocrats also, as far as wheat went. Hard spring wheat was bread wheat—the best in the world. All the soft wheats and the winter wheats grown farther south and west were used for inferior products—restaurant pies and crackers and abominable new kinds of cereals to be eaten cold. Durum wheat was used for macaroni and spaghetti and other foreign things. But the bakers had to have hard spring wheat for bread, even when they mixed it with winter wheat. When there was an American surplus of the softer wheats, they still would have to import Canadian spring wheat in the years when North Dakota did not produce enough. It took an austere climate to create that kind of wheat—wheat that grew hard and full of protein under the withering semidesert sky. It was the kind of durable, determined grain that could survive and flourish on the smallest possible margin—very much like the men who grew it. Like George’s ancestors, who had fought for and built the state that men like James T. Vick were now taking away from them. Half the farmers in the state were tenants now, like George.

Nevertheless, George was still proud to have been born in a state that created distinction from hardship. It pleased his Scottish blood. If ever there was a one-crop state, it was the one he lived in.

The trouble was that a state with such extreme dedication to one crop—bread—was so helpless when something went askew with the market for bread. When the world was lean with war and could buy bread, North Dakota fattened; when the world was lean with peace and could not buy bread, North Dakota starved—through drought and bumper crops. A North Dakota farmer ought to be able to lay up enough cash and own enough livestock so that he didn’t have to plant wheat at all in such a bad year as this one promised to be. But half the farmers in the state had to do what a city man told them to do. The economy needed radical changes that were long overdue. The absentee landlords must be stripped of the absolute power they had over their tenants, the railroads and elevators must be forced to abandon their monopolies, and the Wall Street and Chicago speculators must be outlawed. Until these changes were made, George Armstrong Custer must go on obediently plowing up a hundred and sixty acres of dry blowing land and trying to get a wheat crop out of it.

That night he sat down after supper with his books and figured out how much money he would have to borrow. He needed a little over two hundred bushels of seed, for he always planted the optimum amount—roughly a bushel and a half to the acre. It would be around a hundred and fifty dollars for seed alone. Considering all the other things he would need cash for, including the biggest expense—paying the threshers—he didn’t see how he could possibly get by on less than three hundred dollars cash between now and September.

He must not count on more than forty dollars from cream between now and then, for the prices always dropped in the summer when the market was glutted from all the freshening cows. His five-year record book showed that the year before the Wall Street crash a decent cow, producing around a hundred and fifty pounds of butterfat a year, had brought in sixty-nine dollars cash just for her cream, not counting the skim that had gone to pigs, calves, and chickens. But last year, just four years later, a herd of six cows had netted him less than a hundred and fifty. Last year, of course, had been the worst year in history, but even so, when he put the two sets of figures together, they were hard to take.

“Rachel!” he called out to the kitchen. “Do you realize that a man could make as much money with two cows in 1928 as he can make with six now? It just works out almost to the last penny. A man sweats just as hard and grows just as much feed and cleans out just as much manure and he makes a third as much money. It just don’t figure, does it?”

“Nothing makes sense,” she said.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing makes sense!”

It bothered him to have her agree with him. “Yes it does make sense! It’s just the same old story. Just the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Just Jay Gould and J. P. Morgan and Jim Hill and all the rest of them getting crookeder and richer every day. Why, these senators are proving it on them every day—what they all did on the stock market, and the way they got their monopolies on the railroads! They’re the only ones to blame for the crash—all those birds on Wall Street. They’re the fellows we have to thank for getting twenty-six cents a bushel last fall. But you don’t see any of those big guys losing their shirts, do you? No. Only the little guy.”

But even with the farmer’s market ruined, cream prices were a little better this spring because of the drought. George thought he was safe in counting on forty dollars cash from cream between now and when the wheat checks came in. He would ask Will for two hundred and fifty dollars. Four years ago that much money would not have looked like the fortune of half a lifetime.

He wouldn’t have been quite so reluctant to borrow if he could have done it a little later in the season—June or July, with a stand of growing wheat as security. But this way he was borrowing against ground that still froze every night—ground that wasn’t even his—ground that he was utterly committed to, though it was in no way committed to him. His operating margin had narrowed into a wedge that was threatening to pinch him to death. Everything and everybody had a hold on him, and he had a hold on nothing. So long as rich men wrote the laws, what could a little man do?

Wednesday, April 12

George awoke in the prairie dawn at four in the morning, too hot under the quilts that had been just right when he went to bed, knowing what that hot feeling meant—that the south wind of spring had come and that today was the day he would finally have to borrow money from his father-in-law.

Money became more confusing every day. There were forty bills in Congress calling for some kind of inflation. There was an embargo on shipments of gold from American shores. But rich American citizens who knew the revolution was imminent had already sent so much gold to Switzerland in the last three years that the Swiss, feverishly building vaults, had stopped paying interest on the gold and started charging storage costs.

Some people, convinced by William Jennings Bryan and his Cross of Gold, predicted that leaving the gold standard would be the salvation of the country. Other people, usually rich Easterners, predicted that leaving the gold standard would lead to the violent end of Western civilization—as they put it. George, being a follower of the silver-tongued Nebraskan, believed that his silver standard was already half a century overdue. But whether Roosevelt followed the lead of Bryan or not, there was one thing about money that George was dead sure of when he woke up that morning. Today was the day he had to go to his father-in-law and ask him for two hundred and fifty dollars.

All the while he milked he became more and more furious with his wife’s preaching father—hypocritical old man! He must have kept plenty of it in Jamestown all the time or he wouldn’t have it to spare now. No wonder the old man didn’t want inflation—not with the amount of cold cash he had stashed away. When he got back up to the house and found that Rachel had not quite got the separator together, he erupted.

“For Pete’s sake! I go down and pitch hay to six cows and milk every last one of them by myself and you can’t even get the damned separator together!”

“Maybe that’s because you forgot to run the rinse water through it last night, and when I started to put it together this morning, it was so sour I had to wash every single disk!”

She clamped the two spouts over the thirty-two disks, banged the last fitting on top of them, snatched up a large aluminum float, and let it drop into place with a clang that stung his ears.

“Rachel!” he shouted. “What on earth ails you!”

He began turning the handle with a retaliatory spleen. A bell on the handle rang with every revolution until the speed was up. “Ting! Ting! Ting!” it went, as the thirty-two disks spun faster and faster, building up the force that would separate the milk, particle by particle. When the bell stopped ringing he turned the valve and let the milk flow from the bowl on to the float. The whining groan of the heavy parts whirling in the machine was the only sound in the kitchen.

After he had run all the milk through, he poured the warm cream into one of the cans on the porch and wrote out two tags on the kitchen table.

“I’m going over town to take in the cream and I’ll take Lucy,” he said. “Is there anything you need?”

“Why do you have to take it? Isn’t Otto going to pick it up today?”

“I want to go in and weigh it myself on old man Adams’s scales,” George said. He was being half honest. He did want to check on the weights he’d been getting from the creamery in Jamestown. But mostly this was the best excuse he could think of for getting over to see Will during the daytime when he could try to catch him alone outside. “Besides,” he added, “I don’t trust Wilkes as far as I could throw his Percheron by the tail. If he thought he could get away with it, I wouldn’t put it past him to bring along an empty can of his own and just fill it up with a few dips out of all the other cans he hauls.”

“Oh, George,” Rachel said. “You mustn’t talk that way about a neighbor!” She glanced at Lucy, waiting behind George with her lunch pail. Lucy looked back with that assured gaze that said as clearly as a seven-year-old could, “Do you think I don’t know all about the Wilkeses?”

“Phooey!” George said. He couldn’t stand her sob-sister delicacy—just like her old man’s. “You know the scoundrel as well as I do!” He started out the door. “Is there anything you need? You never answered my question.”

“No … not really. But if you have time I wish you’d stop by the folks’ and pick up that old brooder Dad said we could have. You’re going to have to fix it before we can use it and you might as well get it so you can work on it this Sunday.”

George was simultaneously grateful and annoyed at being handed such a good excuse for stopping to see Will. He was angry because he had to have feelings of gratitude or relief at all, and because now it would look to Will as though he had thought up the brooder himself as a way of reopening the conversation he had so rudely closed. But still, if he should get caught with Rose and be unable to find Will, it would be handy to have a ready-made bit of business with her.

“I reckon I can manage that,” he said.

In the car he said to Lucy, “Days are long again, and three miles is no distance. You ought to be walking home from now on. When I was a boy, I used to walk almost four miles to school every day, whether the days were long or short, till they built that new school next to our place. When I was your age I could have walked home from town in less than an hour.”

“So can I!” Lucy cried. “I’ll do it tonight! I can walk just as fast as a boy!”

It tickled him to be able to get her goat so easily, but he was irritated, too, because she had no business using that tone of voice to him.

“Just watch yourself,” he said coldly.

She bent her head so he couldn’t see her face and outlined with her finger the reflections in her lunch pail. Her cheeks were scarlet. She had a Custer temper all right.

“You can walk tonight,” he told her when he stopped the car at the schoolyard gate.

She jumped out and ran with a straight, easy stride toward the building. She had the best body and the strongest run of any child he could see in the yard. What a waste it was that she hadn’t been born a boy!

He drove back over the tracks from the depot with the two weight tags for a net total of seventy-six pounds of cream, dated and signed by Millard Adams, stuck in the big pocket of his overalls. There just might be some fireworks now, if the creamery check didn’t square with this weight. And if the creamery did agree, there might still be some fireworks. He just might have to ask Otto, how come? Prices were low enough to make him pretty mean about being cheated by a deadbeat who already overcharged him for hauling. And when George Custer felt mean enough …

Rose heard the car when he was halfway up the drive, and stepped out of the house with a welcoming smile that flickered from happiness to civility when she saw that nobody was with him. She didn’t expect to see him during plowing season at this time of day, though Rachel often came with the baby on her way back from taking Lucy to school and stopped for a few minutes.

“Rachel said you folks had a brooder you wasn’t planning to use this spring,” George said.

“Oh, I’m so glad you decided you could use it,” Rose said. It seemed to George that she always said the wrong thing. He always saw through it when she tried to be polite to him. “I’ll just run down and see if it’s in the cellar,” she went on. “I think that’s where I had Will put it.”

She was forever rushing off to frenzied activity when George appeared. It didn’t hurt his feelings any, but it made him nervous. Sometimes it left him standing idle and intensely conscious of his two hundred pounds of unemployed muscle while he had to watch a thin old woman do something she refused to let him do. It was a way she had, he felt, of putting him in his place. Now she proposed to wrestle an unwieldy five-foot disk of galvanized tin up a dark steep set of stairs while he stood uselessly at the top.

She was already down there rummaging about below him.

“Let me carry it up, Rose, for Pete’s sake!”

“Oh, I’ll just see if it’s down here,” she fussed back up at him.

He stood looking through the kitchen window to try to catch a glimpse of Will. Finally she came back up to report that the brooder was not in the cellar.

George had one more chance to find Will alone, if only she would let him go now by himself. He would pack up the whole family and head West before he would let Rose hear him ask Will for money.

“I’ll call him,” she said. “He’s out in the sheep shed, I think.”

She pushed up the window and yelled, “Will? Will?” The way she would start on a high note and then let the one syllable of the name slide down her throat, straining and gargling to get volume from an “l,” was enough to make a man come running to see what awful thing had happened. George was certainly glad that Rachel didn’t call him that way. Not that he would have stood for it.

“Why, I’ll go find him, Rose,” George cried.

He started for the shed, hurrying to head Will off. Sheep were one of the things he and Will disagreed about. George wouldn’t have a sheep on his place. He simply couldn’t stand the beasts, and besides, they ruined good pasture land. Will was putting salve on the ewes’ teats so they wouldn’t crack and chap in the freezing nights. He, too, was a little surprised to see George at that time of day. He pulled a blue bandanna out of his hip pocket and wiped his hands on it. “How’s it going, George?”

“Pretty fair,” George said. “Rachel thought I might as well pick up that brooder you folks don’t need. Rose can’t seem to find it.” He thought Will looked relieved. Was that because Will had had second thoughts about the loan?

“Oh, I meant to tell her,” he said. “I left it out in the granary. Let’s go get it.”

Even after the sliding door had stopped its grumbling and echoing, they could still hear the scraping flight of rodents. “Damn the vermin!” Will said. He had to be really exasperated to swear, and he was. He had stored as much wheat as the granary would hold rather than sell at last fall’s prices. But the rats and mice and insects had seemed to converge on him from the whole country. Their multiplying and marauding had gone on despite his traps and poisons, and the price rise he had been waiting for was still so slight that it would hardly finance the war he had been carrying on, let alone make up for the wheat he had lost.

Will had read the Bible through more times than he had counted—the first time before he was twelve, the age of Jesus in the temple at Jerusalem. And one of the verses he had memorized from early childhood was the one that whispered above the scuttling of the mice each time he opened the granary door, as though the grain spoke from the heavy cold bins: Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.… Take no thought for the morrow.… Consider the lilies of the field.… Wasn’t a man supposed to look out for his family the best way he could? It was certainly hard to know.

They walked into the room where he kept the sacks of feed and chicken mash, and he pulled the brooder away from the wall.

“Some of the braces have to be fixed,” he said. “You’ll have to find some kind of top for the water jar and clean up the burner a little. It’s really in perfectly good shape, but we just can’t use it this year. We got too many chicks last spring. A big flock don’t hardly pay its way now, anyhow.”

George could see that it wasn’t going to occur to Will to bring up the subject. “Well, now then,” he stalled. “I reckon it won’t take too much to get her in shape.” It was now or never.

“I figured I could make a deal with Vick for the seed wheat and the thrashers,” he said, “but the damn fool won’t let me put in any feed and hay if he lends it to me. I had—most of it in the bank.”

“How much do you need?” Will asked.

“Two hundred and fifty would do it, I guess.”

“Are you sure that’s enough? I can spare you three hundred without hurting myself at all.” Will felt that he hadn’t said that the way he wanted to. It sounded as though he was rubbing it in.

“Two hundred and fifty will be a great plenty, and I’ll be much obliged,” George said icily. He’d taken it the wrong way, of course. “I’ll pay you the same interest Goodman would have charged me—the dirty little kike.”

Will wished he could defend Harry, but he didn’t dare.

“I’ll get it here the first of the week and we’ll write up a little note,” Will said.

George picked up the brooder and Will followed with the glass accessories. They were loading the brooder in with the two empty cream cans when Rose came out with a pan of hot cinnamon rolls covered with a dish towel. She put the rolls in the front seat and George climbed in beside them. “Much obliged, folks,” he said.

They watched him go. “I can’t see why George is so set on Ceres,” Will said. “I bet I’ll beat him with Marquis this year, just the way I beat his Marquis last year. Seems like there’s a couple new hybrids every year, but they never do anything except right in the spot where a bunch of Fargo professors are coddling them along in a little kitchen garden. Look at what happened to Clarence Egger when he planted Hope. That just about ruined his hopes for good—that’s what Hope did. Ceres probably won’t work out a bit better, either, but then, you can’t make a young man see things like that.”

George was irritated by the banging of the brooder against the cream cans, but he was even more irritated by the spicy smell of the hot bread. He was sure that Rose was always sending food to his house because she felt his family might not be properly fed.

He walked back into his house carrying a new burden now—no longer of anticipation but of fulfillment. The burden of humbling himself was past, but the burden of debt was just begun. For him the debt was by far the easier burden of the two. Still, if he didn’t get a harvest, there was absolutely no place left to turn. He had already gone to the man he had managed to avoid going to ever since he had married that man’s daughter.

“I got the brooder,” he said to Rachel. And then, as gratuitously as usual, it seemed to her, he added, “I’ll bet your dad has lost a hundred bushels of wheat this winter. That granary is a regular breeding ground for pests. I told him he should have gone ahead and got rid of some of that wheat. I’ve never known the time that that man has listened to reason.”

He stopped to hear what was coming over the radio. Then he guffawed bitterly. “Well, somebody’s happy somewhere today! Beer and wine over the counter! Roosevelt better look out. All the bootleggers’ll be voting Republican next time. Yes, sir! Roosevelt—the friend of the forgotten man! No more Goat Whiskey and Indiana Red Eye. What in the world will the politicians and cops do for graft money now? Why, even your little brother can go on a legal bender today—that is, if he’s in one of the right spots. Where was he, did you say, when he sent the last letter?”

“Arizona. On a ranch.”

“Well! He’s in business then. Did you hear it? Arizona was all ready for Roosevelt. Stuart can go on a nice safe drunk, without losing his eyesight or paralyzing his hands and feet. And he won’t have to guzzle any more canned heat nor antifreeze.”

“Oh, George, why do you hate everybody in my family so much!”

“Because they’re hypocrites! Lucky hypocrites that just happened to get born at the right time. They got in when the getting was good and now they try to tell me it wasn’t luck—it was their hard work and their God-damned religion!”

In a few more weeks Lucy would be promoted to the third grade, beginning the next fall. And still she would be in the same room where she had been this year and last year, and probably have the same old teacher. There would not be a single new thing to look forward to except the miseries of multiplication. She had finished the third-grade reader before she was out of the first grade.

If there had been anybody at home to play with, Lucy would have preferred never to go to school, but Cathy was too little to be much fun. At school she sat at her desk and dug her toes into her shoes all day long, waiting for the big clock over the door to release her. After she had had a pair of shoes for two or three months, the innersoles were worked up into ridges between her toes and the ball of her foot.

By this time of the year the humps were as big as they could get and she could feel the shapes of all her toes in them. She had torn away all the lining from the uppers by scraping at them with her toenails, and large holes were wearing up through the soles, layer by layer, to meet the holes she made with her toes. It was because she skipped so much, her mother said, that she was so hard on shoes, and Lucy tried to remember not to skip, especially in gravel.

Now, with the winter wind suddenly gone and the heated gravel making the bottoms of her feet warm, she felt a hateful itchiness under her skin when she thought of being trapped in the second-grade row, between the first- and third-grade rows, for this whole first day of spring. All day long she had not got over being mad at her father, either, and she had hunched over her papers so Douglas Sinclair couldn’t copy from her. If boys were so much smarter than girls, why did any boy she had ever sat behind always want to copy her papers? If only she dared ask her father that question! And she could chin herself more times than Douglas could, or than either of the other two boys in her grade. She had told her father that, and he had said that was because the boys lived in town and weren’t like the farm boys he had in mind. But he would see, now, how much faster she could walk home than Douglas Sinclair ever could.

Right here, however, she had to walk slowly and make as little noise as she could, for fear of Mr. Greeder’s mean bull, and she put her hot coat back on because she was wearing a red blouse.

It was not polite to say the word bull, or even to think it. In fact, it was practically a sin. Lucy had begun to wonder, lately, how a person was supposed to keep impolite or even terrible words out of her head. She even knew two words that were so bad people only wrote them in different places and never said them, but still the words said themselves in her head; they were very simple words and she knew how they would sound, even though she didn’t know what they meant or why they were terrible.

She couldn’t see the cow, she said loudly in her head, but still she did not dare to unbutton her coat. Two things were sure to make a cow sense your presence, no matter how far away from the road he was. The two things were running or showing something red. It was just the same thing as having a dog smell you if you were afraid.

Finally she reached the foot of the long hill with her family’s mailbox at the top of it, but just as she was starting up, she heard the horses and the creaky buggy behind her. She knew who it was, without looking, by the buggy and the voices. The buggy was so old that there were no more like it in the world. Its black leather top flapped and tilted over a trio of struts coming up on either side of the seat. Behind the double triangles made by the struts sat the stiff black figures, strangely flat and hazy, as though they were hiding in a very old photograph from which they would jump out and come alive at any instant.

At once the sounds of being under water began inside Lucy’s head, and that showed she was afraid, even when she had made up her mind that she wasn’t. It’s only Gid and Gad, she said. Sissy! Sissy! SISSY!

But they looked exactly like every picture of a witch she had ever seen. One appeared to be skinny and the other fat, but all the skin and shape of a woman that ever showed on them was their faces. From their chins down they were heaps of black tassels of shawls and cloaks and heavy black cloth of sleeves and swooping skirts. The buggy drew closer and the sounds of being under water became loud and continuous in her ears.

They’re not witches. They’re just old maids. That’s all that ails them, Daddy said. But they’re mean. Horses don’t pick up their feet that way, so high and fast, as if the ground was afire under them, if they haven’t been trained with chains looped around their legs above their fetlocks. And it’s even against the law to bob their tails like that. Daddy said so. It’s too cruel to cut off a horse’s tail. But they just have horses like that because their family used to be rich and rich people always used to have them. That’s what he said. Gid and Gad were too good for the men around here, they thought, and now they’re nothing but old maids. Old maids are nothing but grown-up women who don’t get married. Not witches.

Anyway, why would real witches need real horses? But perhaps the horses were not real either. A clock could chime or a magic bugle could blow and the horses could turn back into something else.

“Let us give you a ride!”

She had been going to jump into the ditch and run for it if they came after her, but her legs just stood there.

“Put your foot on the step there. There’s lots of room.”

She could feel the way the bones under the black cloth were swaying and pressing together in order to fold her in. At the level of her eyes a pointed shoe stuck out from under the cloth. A line of black fasteners ran down the side of its wrinkled instep. It was impossible to imagine a foot inside the shoe.

“I just go up there,” she whispered, waving her hand at the tiny mailbox so far away.

“But that’s the hardest part of the walk. Hop in here, and we’ll take you up. Do you climb inside, now, and see if the oven is warm yet.”

“Oh, please let me go!”

The witch shut her mouth and her lips disappeared as if she had eaten them. She slashed the horses with her long black whip and the team went into a gallop from a standing start.

Lucy was afraid to move till they were halfway up the hill, still at a gallop. Then she began to run. She didn’t stop until she had turned into the driveway. By then the need of her lungs for air and the underwater sounds in her head were as bad as they were the time last summer when she jumped off the dock into the James River before she knew how to swim. A laughing high-school girl whom she still hated had reached into the water, finally, and pulled her out by the straps across her back. At first she had been thankful, but then she had become embarrassed as she stood there coughing and coughing and coughing, surrounded by laughing people. Sometimes at night, and often when she had done something silly, she would think about that laughing girl who saved her life and grit her teeth trying to stop the embarrassment from burning her face and prickling her eyes with terrible dumbbell sissy tears.

She was beginning to feel it now. Her mother had told her always to be polite to Gid and Gad and not hurt their feelings, because they were sad not to have any little children, and not ever, ever to say they were old maids when they could hear her. Polite, polite. Bull, bull, bull! Old maid, old maid! “Oh, please let me go! Oh, please let me go!”

The mimicking noise in her head could just as well have been Douglas Sinclair running after her, mimicking that unbelievable scream. It went on and on, no matter how many impolite words she shouted back at it.

And still, with all the noise in her head, she thought of how horrible it would be to be an old maid. And then came the thought that even made her stop running. Could she ever marry Douglas Sinclair in order to keep from being an old maid? There was only the one hope left—the miracle she prayed for every night—that God would turn her into a boy so she wouldn’t have to be an old maid, or marry a man either.

“Hello!” her mother said. “You’re home so soon. Did somebody give you a ride?”

“Just ran,” Lucy said.…

It was getting cool in the shadow of the house, but it was warm in the pasture. Lucy slipped under the gate by the barn, straightened up, patted the two little celluloid ducks in her overall pocket to make sure they hadn’t spilled out, and started for the far corner of the farm, running again.

Long before she rounded the hill that stood between her and the slough, she heard the innumerable, unceasing calls of the new flock of blackbirds that had come there to nest. She stopped to listen and watch for a minute. There was at least one bird on every cattail or bit of brush still standing after the winter storms. It was hard to see how a bird hung on to a straight-up-and-down stem that swung under it like that.

She followed one of the rivulets that fed the slough. Its source was a shady ravine where the snow and frost tarried the longest. The rivulet was deep and swift for a long way up the ravine. She took the ducks out of her pocket and launched them tenderly into the water. One of them was brown and the other was gray-blue. She had had them for three years now, and she saved them just for April.

The miniature river wound about hummocks sloped as subtly as the mile-round hills rising behind her. The hummocks were beginning to be green, and the washed black mud of the stream bottom was embroidered with sparkling circlets of unfolding leaves. Here and there the water gushed between dark rocks and the ducks leapt and twirled in the rapids. She made bridges of straw for them to swim beneath because she had always wanted to swim under a bridge herself. She rescued them from eddies and spoke to them about the adventure they were having and warned them about the huge and dangerous ocean they were sailing toward. If only she could be as small as the ducks and live in this enormous kingdom of brilliant water and unexplored forests. That would be a hundred times better even than being turned into a boy.

Each winter as the time for thawing drew near, she began to be afraid that the kingdom of the ravine must really have been a dream. Then she would look at the ducks waiting in their proper spot on the kitchen windowsill, so small against the great swirling feathers of frost on the glass behind them. She would know that in the interlude between the glacial winter wasteland and the flaming summer wasteland, those very ducks had swum down an emerald river in a fairy country that was wet and green, like the places she had read about.

When they reached the ocean, she left them in a safe cove and searched for a rock with which to make a great wave. In just a little while there would be no place to splash a rock for another whole year. The entreaties of the blackbirds rang wildly around her. What did they say to each other that excited them so much? It was awful to have to be a human being and never know what all the animals said and never get to live in a cave or a nest or a tunnel or the waving grasses in the slough.

A flight of small gray birds swept over the water, so close they nearly touched their own shadows. They could have been leaves blowing across ice. How glorious to fly like that and see your own luminous image like an arrow flashing beneath you.

Beyond the slough in the burgeoning pasture lay the blue pools of sky. How lovely to be a baby frog trying out first one pool and then another. Sometimes a cloud briefly dipped a white edge in a blue mirror. Sometimes a big cloud would blot out a mirror. Then suddenly Gid and Gad wheeled their black chariot between the earth and the sun, waving their black sleeves and spreading their barren skirts to eclipse the warm light, transforming the blue glass into a cold murky lake and causing the baby frog to kick out desperately with his long webbed feet and hide in the mud.

Sometimes even the whole pasture would go dark, and then the sun would streak through in some far spot and ignite the ground; she would see the spot burn with an unearthly yellow-green fire. Then the clouds would move again and the darkness and the fire would both be gone.

The sun told her that there was time for only one more voyage down the ravine. She must not be late with the cows. Cows could be very stubborn in new grass, especially this time of year when they were not in a hurry to be milked. Most of them were half dry because they would soon be getting new calves.

At last she put the two ducks back in her pocket, wrapped in her handkerchief to get dry and warm. The clouds had multiplied and massed in the sky and the shadows of them raced over her and turned the air frosty around her. She began to notice how icy the soaked wrists of her sweater felt and how wet the knees and seat of her overalls had gotten.

She ran up the hill that bordered the west end of the slough, hoping to find the cows before dusk overtook her. They were there, lined up against the fence and reaching through it, though there was not a whit more grass on the other side. Cows were never happy, once they came to a fence.

“Hie on there!” she yelled. “Cuh boss, cuh boss! Hie on there!” They swung their heads on their flat supple necks and looked at her, but they did not move. She picked up a small stone and shied it off the flank of the nearest one. They started off then, but they stopped to chew at every likely tuft they passed.

She studied the western horizon, feeling so much smaller now that the sun had gone from the pasture. The clouds banked above the hills had turned in a few minutes from white to deep blue. The sun was behind them, lighting their upper edges with a cold pale gold. Her father could always tell when it was going to rain by looking at the clouds. She wanted to be able to tell, too, so that some day he would have to say that she was just as smart as a boy.

He was waiting for her at the barn, smoking a cigarette and leaning against the edges of the open double doors.

“Right on time,” he said approvingly. He seldom sounded that way, and she was encouraged to try again to please him.

“It looks like it might rain tomorrow, doesn’t it?” she said, looking once more toward the west before they followed the cows into the barn.

“Could be,” he agreed, in a half-listening tone. “Could be,” he said again, for the rhythm of it.

She could tell he had forgotten she was there. She went up the hill to the house.

“How on earth did you get so wet?” her mother said. “You just got over one cold, and now you’ll probably get another. Hang your sweater by the stove and change into your other overalls. And you better take off your shoes and put on your slippers. Then hurry and set the table.”

It was impossible for Rachel not to worry over how thin Lucy was when she saw how purple the cold made her. Her little body seemed so breakable, with such long bony legs and such sharply pointed wrists and ankles. But whenever Rachel mentioned getting Lucy’s tonsils out so she could gain weight, George would say, “Oh, pshaw! You ought to have seen me at that age! She’s fat compared to what I was!”

“Why do Gid and Gad always wear such long black dresses?” Lucy asked.

Where did that question come from? Rachel looked out the west window of the kitchen at the gold-and-blue clouds. “Why, maybe because they’re poor now, like all the rest of us. Maybe they don’t have any other clothes.”

She turned from the window to confront the deep inscrutable blue of the clouds in Lucy’s eyes. They looked at her just the same way George’s did when she didn’t manage to say exactly the right thing to him. And sometimes those eyes, only seven years old, could look just as implacable as George’s, and sometimes as shocking and furious.

Lucy took the ducks out of her pocket and arranged them on the windowsill. When she looked up again, the blue of her eyes was the happy artless blue of the clean melted-snow pools in a greening pasture.