Monday, April 17

The Wheeler inflation amendment to President Roosevelt’s farm relief bill was defeated in the Senate, thus leaving the value of the money under Will’s dead crab-apple tree still in doubt. Most of the big banks in the country were open again, and whole cities, so Will read in the papers, were going on spending sprees. However, there were no spending sprees in Eureka, North Dakota, nor in a thousand or so other places a great deal like it. The Treasury Department closed permanently the banks in those places. Most of them were very like Harry’s bank—little square wooden buildings set between other square wooden buildings on graveled prairie streets: little concentrations of desolation in the midst of millions of acres of desolation—emptiness distilled from emptiness. The desert sky and the blowing acres were omnipotent—immune to accusation. But the empty little banks with the boarded-over windows were there to point at, to explain all the other emptinesses, to be responsible for what had gone wrong with the world. The Treasury Department was so busy reopening the banks in big cities and restoring confidence to the country that none of the government auditors had got around to making final disbursements to Harry’s depositors yet, but the depositors all knew what to expect, and it didn’t matter that the auditors took their time about coming out to the country.

Will went out to dig up his money and take it back to the Guardian Trust Company in Jamestown. With the snow gone and the ground loosened up, he came upon the box after only a few spadefuls. It startled him; he had had the feeling that it was deeper than that. He held it in his hands and thought how he had no more right than any other man to be holding a box with his life savings in it.

He heard another whisper, like the one he always heard in the granary. The rust of your gold and silver shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. And the one he must have had for a Sunday school memory verse before he was four years old—the one as short and unequivocal as a bullet—For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Could his heart really be in this rusted box? Would he break the rusted lock to find the money gone and a jeering comic valentine—his heart—in its place? No, here was the paper money, not so crisp as it had been, but not rusted either—the treasure he had heaped together for the last days.

He took it into the house and stuck three hundred dollars in a vase far back on the top shelf behind the good dishes. He hoped he’d have a chance to slip it to George soon. He didn’t like having that much money around loose. He changed into his suit and went out to the kitchen to say goodby to Rose.

He thought of something at the door. “Maybe we oughtn’t to let Rachel know about this—let George tell her. And I let him think you weren’t in on it either.”

“I don’t expect to talk to him about it! And I won’t to Rachel either. She’s got enough worries. I don’t care where George tells her he got the money.”

“Well, so long then,” Will said. He didn’t feel a hundred per cent safe about putting his money back into a bank. He wanted to stay in the kitchen with Rose and not go to Jamestown at all.

He tossed up the box, twirling it end over end, so high that it nearly touched the ceiling. “Come on. Get your hat and go to Jimtown with me.”

“Will, have you gone out of your head?”

He would not have known, from the way he felt, that spring had come.

That spring came like a wandering, useless uncle of the family, welcomed only by the dogs and children who could not see that it was a shabby deceiver. In the prairies from Texas to Saskatchewan its carousing roiled the dust of nine years of drought. Dust thickened over the new leaves before they were fairly uncurled, and dust now, instead of frozen miles of water, choked the space between the earth and the sun, causing that northward-moving star to swell and bleed in prophetic tides across the evening sky.

But the birds still flocked to the north in their sudden vast numbers, and the children played in the mud, and the seeds knew that it was springtime.

Rachel was in the dining room, delicately sprinkling the thread-thin seedlings of tomato plants, when she heard the babble of red-winged blackbirds arriving in the north grove. She went out to the porch to watch them come. The bare tree limbs were clotted black with them, and the whole sky seemed hardly able to contain their singing. She thought how harmonious they were—how the staccato flash of red on their obsidian wings was so like the staccato music they wrenched from their tireless throats.

They would wait only a little while in the grove before they followed the other blackbirds to the slough and began building their nests in the reeds. They would eat insects until the wheat began to head. Then they would eat wheat.

She never ceased to wonder at the incredible powers of birds for adaptation. These had flown perhaps a thousand miles from the South to raise their families in the northern prairie. Some people thought migrations were a habit left over from the Ice Age, but nobody really knew why birds migrated. Why didn’t they just stay in the South all the time? Perhaps it was their migrations that kept them hardy and pliable and able to survive drastic changes in the world. Perhaps people ought to migrate too, and never strive to put down roots at all. It often seemed to her that the desire of human beings to own land was the cause of all their troubles. Their desire kept them enslaved, from one generation to the next. Yet how would a human being know who he was, without roots?

George was getting the plowing done at an encouraging pace. The weather had been so favorable that he was actually doing as much work as he had planned to do, and that happened rarely. There was no land like this North Dakota prairie anywhere else in the world, he thought. But it was no good if it never got water, or if it was all allowed to blow away.

A man who wanted to farm that land had to do what the land did. He had to explode with the spring explosion, and work as close to all the hours of the day as he could, just as the thawing winds and the germinating seeds worked all the hours of the day. And in the fall he ought to leave the ground strictly alone, the way the buffalo and Indians left the dying grass to hold the sleeping soil in the clasp of an ancient root system while the winds blew through the fall and winter and spring. But in the last few years George had seen more than one summer-fallowed field where the wind had completely leveled six-inch furrows. That was six inches of topsoil gone in one winter. It took a hundred years to make an inch of topsoil.

But the people who tried to farm too much land plowed up as much stubble as they could find in the fall, so they could have that much more time in the spring for disking, harrowing, and drilling. Will was one who did that. He had begun farming in the days when there were sizable stretches of unbroken prairie to help stop the dust, and like all other old men he figured that what had always worked should go on working.

George looked ahead and behind at the two incisive black lines he drew through the stubble—at the latitudes and longitudes he created. Among all the lines in the world that crossed and crossed and went to unknown points, only his own were significant as he rode the steel seat mounted over the two fourteen-inch plowshares, while the sixteen obedient hoofs plodded ahead of him, day after day.

When the flock of blackbirds passed between him and the clouds, he did look up for an instant. It wouldn’t be long before they would be back to feed on the grain. Just one of the plagues visited upon the helpless earth by the busy sky. He looked back down between his legs at the plow blades just in time to see a fair-sized snake slither away behind him. Too bad a wheel or a blade hadn’t got it. That snake would eat a hundred toads that would otherwise eat a hundred thousand insects. There were precious few creatures of a field that were on the side of the farmer, that was a cinch.

Halfway up the south side of the field he heard the clear brave call of a meadowlark. That was one of the few creatures on his side. Meadowlarks ate no grain at all—only insects by the millions—especially grasshoppers. The hoppers loved drought; they throve on it as the wheat perished from it. The USDA was putting out a lot of publicity about how bad the grasshoppers were going to be this year, trying to get the farmers to put out poisoned bait. But the farmers who had to borrow money for seed had none to spare for bait. In spot-checked areas around the Dakotas the USDA found 10,000 grasshopper eggs per square foot of sod. Four different varieties of them would begin to hatch in another week or so. Last year they had even stripped the leaves from the trees in some places, and left cornfields as bare as fallow prairie.

Yes, so far as George was concerned, there was no sound in the world like the call of a meadowlark—his friend that preyed upon his enemies. He heard it call again, beginning on a high G natural and dropping about a third to an E, then back to G, then down five notes to a C, then back to E and G, with a final trill all the way down to C.

He had an acute ear for music. When he was young, the boys had got together a little band for dancing, and he had played the clarinet. He had fingered out the meadowlark’s call one day, and had been surprised to find how high it was. That call was one of the earliest sounds in his memory. When he was five or six years old, herding cattle far from the house, that call in the early morning had made the long day ahead seem less lonely.

As he passed a bunch of dead Russian thistles caught in the fence, he glimpsed the brightness of the lark’s yellow breast. No doubt it was making a nest there. When it sat on the nest to hatch its eggs, the yellow breast would not show; only the brown back, striped and speckled with black, would be visible, so that from above the bird would look like the shadows of the thistles on the ground. But that clever coloring hardly helped it or its eggs or its babies so far as rats, weasels, barncats, coyotes, and egg-sucking dogs were concerned. Well, he hoped that particular one would manage to raise a hungry brood or two, to discourage the grasshoppers a little. He’d remember where it was and leave those thistles when he got around to burning.

A little way past the lark, the fence was sagging from its load of thistles and the dust they had stopped. He’d have to replace a post there if he didn’t clear it out pretty soon. When he was growing up, the days of the real Western tumbleweed were still not over. It grew six or seven feet tall on a tough stem that broke away from the ground in the fall after a few frosty nights. It would roll on the round crown of its branches until the wind flipped it up and it landed on its stem. Then it would bounce into the air like a clown on a circus net. Tumbleweeds had no stickers, and if they were young enough and the cattle were hungry enough, the stock on the range would eat them.

But Russian thistles were a different story. They were shaped less like the tall cowboys who made the songs about tumbleweeds and more like the squat round immigrants who had stupidly transplanted them from the Old World. Russian thistles grew long hard barbs, and when they broke loose and started to roll, a man had to dodge or get nettled right through his overalls.

After the lark stopped singing, George heard few sounds save those made by the horses and the machinery. But the silence was filled with the mute strugglings of a multitudinous embryonic hostility—in the wombs of rodents, the egg sacs of birds, and the laid and unlaid eggs of insects. Even the seemingly impeccable air was at this instant drifting over his field the spores of ruinous diseases.…

He sang loudly to the horses, to cheer them along and to do something about the silence.

“Hey, George!”

He almost jumped off the plow seat. Trust his wife’s father to sneak up on a man from behind like that in the middle of an empty field.

Will held out an envelope. “I wrote this up for four per cent,” he said. “Keep it for as long as you need it.”

“Four per cent is not what I’d pay anywhere else, and you know it,” George said. “I’ll pay you eight.”

“Whatever you say. But don’t let it be on your mind, George. See you later.”

“You bet,” George shouted after him. “Much obliged.”

I’ll pay him ten per cent, he thought. “Don’t let it be on your mind.” Oh, no, of course not! Don’t let a loan from your pious father-in-law be on your mind, especially when it’s more money than you cleared on your whole damn wheat crop last year, especially when you had to borrow it because of the dirty Jew who was going scot-free at this exact instant while you were riding around a field making two furrows at a time with a four-horse team that ought to be replaced by a tractor which ate only when it worked.

No, don’t let it be on your mind. I’ll pay him twelve per cent, he said to himself, and he began to see how the wheat would grow around him—the good Ceres that would not rust, that would harvest maybe twenty bushels to the acre if the whole world didn’t burn up before the summer was over.

Then the wheat was pouring out of the threshing machine, making a golden-brown mountain in the truck. He was driving it to the elevator where Adolph Beahr was unusually respectful. “By God, George! You was on the right track, after all!”

The price would be up because of the drought. Down South, the papers said, more than a third of the winter wheat acreage had already been abandoned. When the wheat checks were all in, his neighbors came to buy from him the seed they were now deriding him about, for the Marquis had barely been worth harvesting because of rust. And when George repaid the loan, at a higher interest than he would have paid Harry, he would offer to sell Will some Ceres seed at a much lower price than it was worth. He would show him that the young men were still able to hold their own when it came to passing out big favors.

After he dropped Lucy at school the next morning, George went around to the elevator to order the seed. Adolph wasn’t even there yet. The elevators and the railroads—even after thirty, forty, fifty years of battles—they still ran the farmer. They could even afford to keep bankers’ hours. He didn’t want to wait around. He’d come back in the afternoon to hand his borrowed money to this leisurely middleman. Then he could give Lucy a lift too.

Middlemen got sixty per cent of the consumer’s food dollar. City people didn’t know that. They blamed the high food prices on the farmer. Why didn’t the newspaper editors and the trade union rabble-rousers take the trouble to come out and see just how rich the farmer was? The government had given the railroads so much land on either side of their rights-of-way that the grain elevators and flour mills had to be built on railroad property. Very simple to see what kind of schemes and monopolies this situation led to.

There were always ways to get around antitrust laws if you were big enough. But when the farmers got together and tried to build their own cooperative elevators—ah, that was a different story. The Supreme Court ruled that the farmers’ cooperatives were an illegal “combination in restraint of trade.”

As far as George was concerned, most farm organizations were not allowed to be anything more than vehicles to carry the ballyhoo of the big farmers to ignorant city people. The Farmers’ Union appeared to be on the side of the little fellow, but what did it ever accomplish?

Last summer, for example, the Union organized the first of the big farm strikes that still went on here and there. But what happened? Half of the delegates to the Farm Holiday Convention could not get to Des Moines because so many banks were already on “holiday” that the farmers couldn’t scare up cash for railroad fares. And what did those farmer delegates actually do about the crooks who were sitting on their money? Why, they wrote a catchy little song about it.

Phooey! Then these earnest delegates went on to figure out that with taxes, mortgage payments, and costs of nonfarm products at the level they were, a little man farming a cash crop of a quarter section of wheat, like George, could not continue to exist unless he got ninety-two cents a bushel for it. But even while the strike was on, farmers like George were getting twenty-six cents, and none of the road blockades, the slogans and songs, the fights, the picketing, the storming of jails and capitol buildings moved the prices one iota. No, it was going to take a much bigger, sterner outfit than the Farmers’ Union, with its fine songs and statistics, to fight the fat middlemen.

In North Dakota, where the Farmers’ Union was strong, some state and national congressmen met in Bismarck and put out a grandiose statement urging the farmers to organize and barricade themselves on their farms and refuse to submit to foreclosures. The farmers were advised “to pay no existing debts, except for taxes and the necessities of life,” unless satisfactory reductions were made to bring farm prices on a par with other prices. George remembered that one part of the statement exactly, because he had been so incensed at those inane exceptions. Why agree to pay taxes to a government that did nothing for him? Why exempt the “necessities of life”? What else did a farmer ever buy? Nobody had gone far enough yet to get George really interested. He had seen too many schemes for wild political action in the twenties and too many farmers’ cooperatives fall apart. It was going to take bloodshed to change things for the farmer.

He stopped at the mailbox and took out the Jamestown Sun. FARMERS ATTACK DISTRICT JUDGE was the headline. More of the same B.S. He could have written it himself. So they all signed a useless little petition to a judge who was paid by rich men for his favors. So what! In Le Mars, Iowa, the story said, a hundred farmers had tried to make a district judge promise to sign no more farm mortgage foreclosures. Yeah! You bet!

But wait a minute—when the judge said no, the farmers dragged him off his bench, socked him good, blindfolded him, hauled him in the back of a truck to a lonely spot in the road, put a rope around his neck, choked him till they nearly scared him to death, smeared his face with axle grease, and left him without any pants. A district judge without any pants.

He laughed all the way down to the house and he was still laughing while he harnessed the team and hitched up to the plow. Now that was the kind of action those boys would understand—just what he’d been advocating right along.

That Le Mars must be quite a town. He recalled reading a couple of months before how the farmers had almost hung an agent of the New York Life Insurance Company there. The agent came out from New York to foreclose on a mortgage of $30,000 and submitted the highest sale bid himself. It was the highest bid, but it was only $20,000. That was the legalized tyranny the insurance companies enjoyed these days. They took away a man’s whole farm and the farmer still owed them ten thousand dollars.

There must be two or three real men down at Le Mars. That was all it would take in any one place. And then when the good men got together, the revolt would begin. Not a man now old enough to run a farm could forget how a dozen years ago the insurance companies had been begging the farmers to borrow money from them. The moneylenders all wanted to get in on the skyrocketing land values. And now that land values had collapsed along with the farmers’ markets, the moneylenders would get their money back any way they could. Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. Well, that policy could work both ways, as they would find out one of these days.

The day was coming when neither the rich men in the government nor the rich men in business would dare to send their lackeys to squeeze money out of the West and take it back to Wall Street.

Around and around rode George Armstrong Custer, drawing his two furrows behind him, and the vision grew and took the shapes and sounds of life. First he would get an eviction notice from the city man. James T. Vick would be coming with the sheriff, despite the threats and proclamations of Wild Bill Langer to call out the state militia against the county sheriffs. But George would not need any militia. No man in the county was a better shot. He and his family would be fortified in his own haymow. It would be a cinch compared to fighting Indians. Indians would burn him out up there, but not Vick. Before George fixed the old wreck, it could hardly have been called a barn. Vick wanted that barn now. He wanted to repossess the barn with all the lumber and work that George had put into it. Vick would not burn it to get him. Very comfortable up in that mow—plenty of food and water, blankets to spread over the hay. Plenty of rifle shells. Hardly any challenge at all, for a man whose ancestors had fought their way across nearly two thousand miles of frontiers.

When Vick arrived, riding in the official car between Sheriff Richard Press and a deputy, the yard would look deserted. Vick would have a moment of feeling foolish, having brought the Law thirty miles to a place already deserted. Then the dust would explode about a foot away from Vick’s polished city shoes. It made George smile to hear the way the yellow storekeeper would scream and to see how he would dive back into the sheriff’s car. The sheriff would have to put on a show, and he would discharge his pistol in the direction of the barn. Another dust explosion would occur a few inches away from the sheriff’s boot.

The sheriff would have everything to lose and hardly anything to gain, except a campaign contribution and a little graft. He would also retreat to the official car. The deputy would never have got out from behind the wheel at all. They would confer for a moment. A bullet would ring a terrifying alarm on the front bumper. In the midst of that echo, the starter would whinny for a moment and then the engine would turn over. But before the deputy could get the car into gear, the three quaking men in the front seat would feel a front tire burst beneath them. They would turn in a wide giddy circle, thumping along on the raw rim, and waver back up the rutted lane like the scared rabbits they were. George and his family would climb down from the haymow, then, having spent exactly four bullets to defend their rights.

No, it wasn’t that George Custer was not ready to fight. It was just that he hadn’t seen any fight worth getting into yet. The Farm Holiday News could go right on “declaring war on the International Bankers and lesser money barons,” and never make the monopolists and the speculators bat an eyelash. It was going to take blood; they would faint dead away at the sight of a little plutocratic blood on the ground. One thing those potbellied bankers never seemed to realize was that there were a lot of men like George A. Custer who had a hell of a lot of time to think about things while they rode a plow around and around a field.

Lucy sat in the front seat of the old Ford, parked in the afternoon shadow of the elevator, while her father ordered his seed wheat. She had begun to understand that people had complex feelings about the elevator, and her own feelings about it were also mixed. She couldn’t help being excited by it because so many things happened there. On the other hand, she knew that her father did not like Adolph Beahr, and she had her own reasons for being uncomfortable around him.

She did not at all mind being left in the car while her father went up to talk to him. Often while she sat and waited, a freight train of a hundred cars or more would go by, creaking as though its weight would tip it from its wheels, slowing for the station and then lumbering on to the east or west.

But as big as the trains were, the elevator made them look very small, with its plain lines rising so much higher than any other building she had ever seen. When she went inside with her father, she was stirred by the smells and sounds of it, and the height of its ceilings, and the stairs going up and up and up, as in a great castle. At harvest time the great iron doors were pushed back and she got to ride the truck inside, couched on fragrant, dusty wheat.

Once they weighed her along with the wheat, and then Mr. Beahr, laughing as grownups did, swung her down and took her over to a set of scales at the side, where he weighed out sacks. She could still remember how his fingers had been around her bare ribs. He had kept one hard hand far down on her stomach while he fiddled with the scales till they balanced at fifty-one pounds.

She had been wearing only the boxer shorts that her mother made for her, and he had reached down and hooked his finger under the elastic at the back of her waist, pulled it out and let it snap against her skin. Then he had laughed again until his laughter came back from the faraway ceilings, and he said loudly, “We’ll have to take off a little for the shorts here.” What he said echoed too, and it came back sounding like “We’ll have to take off the little shorts here.”

Her father had been terribly mad at Mr. Beahr, though he did not show it at all right then. That night she had heard him telling her mother about it.

“That hoary old buzzard,” he said. “One of these days I’m going to smash him on top of his fat head so hard he’ll have three tongues in his shoes. I just wish he’d lay his dirty paws on me sometime!”

Whenever she thought about Mr. Beahr weighing her, she was a little relieved just to be waiting in the car. This time it took her father so long that she was rewarded by the passing of a train. She saw the semaphore to the east uncannily raise its arm long before she could even hear the train. Her grandfather had told her that meant for the engineer to go straight on through. Then when the train was in sight, the flat round bell at the road crossing began to clang desperately back and forth. That red bell made her feel that even while it was warning her away, it was calling her, too. It gave her the same feeling she had when she climbed so high in a tree that she knew it would kill her to fall to the ground. Then part of her was afraid of falling, but another part of her kept calling, “Jump! Jump! Try it! Jump!”

Then while the bell clanged, the engine rushed through so fast that she barely saw the big glove of the engineer waving out his window at her before the cars with faces at the windows began to stream by. She had to look hard in order to count the cars, watch for the mail sack to be snatched from its post, and wave back at all the waving people. She usually didn’t like waving at people because it made her feel silly and strange, but she liked waving at people in trains because they went away so fast.

She was deeply pleased to have seen the whole thing, starting with the semaphore arm and ending with the brakeman saluting her from the open platform of the last car. It was so necessary to get through things from start to finish. One of the reasons she was in such a hurry to grow up was that people interrupted her whenever they felt like it, and didn’t care whether something got finished or not. When she was grown-up herself they couldn’t do that any more. She was glad it was taking her father so long up there in the office.

Her father did not like the railroad at all. He was always saying that the Northern Pacific owned the state of North Dakota. But she herself liked absolutely everything about a train. She liked to keep track of the different pictures painted on the box cars and notice interesting things about the long numbers on them—like a one-three-five-seven or a three-three-three-nine or a two-two-four-eight. If she watched hard enough, she got a wonderful blurred feeling as though she was moving with the train.

Some trains would be made of almost every kind of car, and then she wouldn’t bother with the numbers. She would just watch the red-brown flanks of the steers through the slats of the cattle cars and smell the sweet raw lumber on the flatcars and admire the enormous cylinders of the tank cars.

And always at the beginning and end of every train were the trainmen who gave her a long, deliberate, majestic wave, as though she was somebody very important.

Adolph was charging him too much, George knew, but not as much too much as he had feared. He could make it, all right, with what he had borrowed and what the cream would bring. As they finished up their deal, Adolph said, “Looks pretty bad down South, don’t it? Should help us all a little up here, anyhow.”

“I reckon the biggest hog has finally got what he had coming to him,” George said.

Adolph was a blindly devout Republican, almost as bad as Zack Hoefener, and George took a great pleasure in twitting him with quotations from the Hoover administration. Hoover’s Farm Board chairman had gone to Kansas last fall to plead with the winter wheat men to cut back their acreage, and he had become so infuriated with the responses he got that he told a large farm audience in Wichita, “The biggest hog will always lie in the trough. Kansas is now in the trough.”

Even Northern wheat farmers were aghast at such a statement from a government man who was supposed to be on the farmer’s side. And to add insult to injury, that Farm Board chairman was also the president of the International Harvester Company and he had made his millions by selling machinery to wheat farmers. And the kind of machinery he manufactured was one of the major reasons why there was now the kind of wheat surplus that had caused him to make his remarks about Kansas. The Farm Board chairman’s cloudy view of the wheat farmer’s world seemed surpassed only by his enormous ingratitude to that world for making him a millionaire. Newspaper editors were still lambasting him, even now that a new administration had come to power.

Adolph had got what he’d laid himself open to, and he knew it. “Well, good luck with the seed,” he said.

“You bet. Prosperity’s just around the corner,” said George.

For me, he added to himself as he walked out of Adolph’s office. The way things were now, it was dog eat dog when you farmed wheat, and one man’s catastrophe was another man’s salvation. That was why he had to risk everything this year to switch his seed. It would be different if he could farm his own way, but so long as Vick could tell him how much wheat to plant, he had to do his best to profit by what had happened to the Kansas winter wheat men. Let the trough go dry and the hog starve for a while.

He almost ran down the short flight of wooden steps, worn and scooped in their centers by the boots of farmers who kept Adolph well-to-do, whether they succeeded or failed. Adolph could always wait for the good years, his comfortable operating margin stored away in the great chambers above him, while he gazed out over the town backed up against the railroad tracks. He could always wait till some farmer had to have cash and then he could buy wheat at any price he named. In this late afternoon he could see the shadow of his building stretch nearly across the town.

George pulled open the door and climbed in under the wheel next to Lucy. “What’s the matter, pickle-puss?” he said. He had found out she hated that nickname, so he teased her with it—to get her so the town kids wouldn’t bother her so much, he said.

“Nothing is the matter,” she said.

He grabbed her thigh and rolled the muscles of her leg between his great fingers, exclaiming in a scolding voice, “Why Lucy, what’s the matter with you? Have you gone clean out of your head? What ails you, anyway, Lucy? What makes you carry on like this? What’re you laughing so much for, if something’s bothering you? Can’t you make up your mind whether to laugh or cry? Just like a woman!”

She was giggling hysterically and screaming at him to stop, wanting the awful tickling to stop, but wishing he would go on noticing her—and he must have, because when they went to the store, he did not give her a penny, but a whole nickel.

Sunday, April 30

The next day was May Day. Next to Christmas and the Fourth of July, it was the biggest holiday of the year. Lucy lay in bed, but she could not sleep. It was eight o’clock but the sun had set only an hour ago and the long twilight was still there, behind the thin shade. Tomorrow was May Day. Tomorrow was May Day. Her father was reading a long piece in the paper, interspersing the reading with comments and raising his voice so that her mother could hear him above the noise of the dishes in the kitchen.

“This is just what I told you would happen, Rachel,” he was saying loudly. “I told you it couldn’t help but happen. It says here that yesterday Henry Morgenthau liquidated the last million bushels of September wheat owned by the government. Sold it in the Chicago pit. Says that from May of 1930 to this last March the Farm Board bought nine million bushels of wheat through Hoover’s Grain Stabilization Corporation, and now that they’ve sold the last of it they figure the government lost over a hundred and sixty million dollars. It took them just three years to lose a hundred and sixty million dollars. Oh, they’ll admit now that it was a crackpot idea. Any little farmer like me could’ve told those fatheads exactly what would happen—just in case they didn’t know just as well as I did!

“Pay prices way above the world market and what do you get? A lot of men that never farmed before jumping in and plowing up virgin soil so’s they can get their hands on those government loans. But you notice a little guy like me can’t even get a sniff at those loans to help out the farmer, can he? The rich man that never did a day’s work in his life—he can get paid by the government for a bunch of wheat stored in his own granaries that he’s never even seen! He gets a loan on it! A loan he never has to pay back. But they fix it so a little guy like me can never get one of those loans. A man has to have this qualification and that qualification, and be the head jackass of some damned lodge!”

He was quiet for a minute and then he yelled, “You know what Morgenthau sold that last million bushels for? Sixty-nine cents! I got twenty-six last fall from Adolph—the same time the government was buying that wheat from the rich men. If the government is losing millions of dollars selling twenty-six-cent wheat for sixty-nine cents, then who in hell is getting their fat hands on all that dough? It don’t make sense no matter how you look at it, does it? It just has to be as crooked as a bear’s hind leg. Who is it, anyhow, getting all that taxpayers’ money?

“Rachel, can you hear me?” he called. “Just who do you think is getting that forty-three cents, anyhow? Who? The government sells at a loss for nearly three times what I could get last fall. Think of it!”

“I am thinking of it,” she said. “But I don’t understand it any more than you do! The whole world is just crazy, that’s all!”

Lucy got scared when she heard her mother say things like that. What happened, anyway, when the whole world was crazy?

“Oh, no, it isn’t!” her father cried. “Some of us are not crazy, and we know exactly where all those government losses went to. I can walk right down the street tomorrow and point to the pockets our tax money has gone into.”

Lucy could see how they would walk down the wooden sidewalks in Eureka, looking for bulges in pockets, and listening for jingling sounds.

“The elevators owned by the big men got the best rates in history for wheat storage! That’s one set of pockets. And the rich farmers got such generous loans — and I reckon the railroads got even better pay than I have to pay them. I tell you, the whole thing is rotten! It stinks to high heaven! How can you fight a thing like this, anyhow?”

“I don’t think you can,” her mother said.

“Oh, yes I can! You just wait till enough little guys like me figure out just how bad they’ve been skinned. We’ll fight it all right.”

It was quiet for a while, and Lucy could begin to hear the sounds of the late spring twilight. Then her father gave a mad laugh. “‘Stabilization,’ they called it. ‘Grain stabilization!’ My, aren’t the prices going to be stable now, with the government unloading an accumulation like that just a few months before we try to sell a crop this fall! It’s just as bad as the damn Roosians unloading all their wheat all over the world for three years now. Stabbed in the back by your own government! And you have to pay for the knife yourself! How much longer do they think they can do this to us? I tell you, there’s going to be blood.”

Blood! She never could understand what he meant when he said there was going to be blood. Sometimes when they thought she was asleep they talked about getting her tonsils out or taking her to the dentist. Sometimes it was about this terrible thing that was going to happen to the world. It always seemed to have something to do with blood.

Finally she was too sleepy to keep up with what they were saying. Tomorrow was May Day. Tomorrow she would win a race and get a quarter for a prize. The sounds of the frogs singing in the slough came clear and liquid above the dry rattle of the Jamestown Sun.

Monday, May 1

There were enough races and other strenuous contests to last the whole day, for people who lived by muscular toil knew no other way to play. There were long races and dashes for all age groups, beginning with the five-year-olds, and specialty races such as the sack race and the three-legged hop. There were broad jumping and high jumping, throwing, horseshoe-pitching, and weight-lifting. And there were such unclassifiable events as the hog-calling competition and the rolling-pin-throwing contest, where two prizes were given—one to the woman who threw the farthest and one to the husband who ran the fastest. There was a conscientious dance done by the primary pupils, and afterwards their crepe paper streamers danced around the Maypole alone in the wind.

The celebration was always held in the same public field—a two-acre rectangle bordering the railroad tracks. It was pleasantly green at that time of year and it was big enough to hold several times as many people as there were in the town and all the farmers the town existed to serve.

All the dogs in town were there, stopping races and knocking over children. Horses munched in their feed bags, stamping and switching their tails as the newly hatched swarms of gnats and horseflies hurried to the feast.

Young men jostled and insulted each other as they stood in the sidelines panting and sweating from one event and getting wind back for the next one. Women pushed together the folding tables from the church, the town hall, and the school. Then they spread them with the tablecloths they had brought from home, making each long table a mosaic of checks, flowers, colors, and whites. Finally they superimposed another mosaic on the first, made of the individual intricacies of pies, cakes, salads, sandwiches, pans of meat loaf and pots of beans. Old men leaned their blue or white elbows on the tables, waiting near dishes they were especially interested in.

The May Day field itself was made of all the common ingredients of festivals kept by the anonymous servants of life. It was a canvas for the portrait of hope in equinoxes and solstices that had for centuries made tolerable the lot of those whose lives were, in fact, not tolerable. The feast and the faces might have been painted by Brueghel, and so might the dogs and horses and grass and sky—extreme, wantonly brilliant, blown by the wind, and embraced by the young, tender fire of a returning sun.

When Lucy thought about the many spectacles in this cornucopia of spring, she saw herself speeding across the finish line first, and then she saw Fred Wertzler, the postmaster, reaching down and leaving a big heavy quarter in her hand. Last, but not least, was the picture of herself showing the quarter to all the town kids who had raced against her.

To George, May Day was the one day of the year when, for many years, he had been bested by no man in half a dozen contests. He was no good at the dash, but once he got his great strength in motion, nobody could beat him running a long race. The momentum he created at the beginning seemed to move his iron legs around the rest of the course without any more impetus from him, and his deep chest never ached for air. His keen eyes, his powerful, long-fingered hands won him more laurels. Nobody else could throw so hard or so accurately; nobody else could squeeze a raw potato into sheer pulp that dripped through his fingers. It all came from working hard when he was very young. He would stand and watch now, and compare the softness of the twenty-year-olds to the way he had been himself. If he were not afraid of embarrassing this new generation of pantywaists, he would get out there and make them eat his dust—show them what a tough old man like himself could do.

Still, he liked to watch them trying—he liked to get to the field in plenty of time for the first event. Above all he hoped that Lucy would follow in his footsteps—it was hard for a man like him not to have a boy, but Lucy could beat the boys at most things anyhow. She had been so shy last year. Another year of school ought to have made her more confident and competitive—like him. He had watched her shinnying up her swing rope, chinning herself on the bar he had put up for her between two trees, running easily, as he did himself, across half a mile of pasture. Like him, if she got up enough momentum she could jump a remarkable distance; he had seen her go over a seven-foot puddle with inches to spare. Like him she was physically fearless. She would tease her mother from some precarious place high in a tree, hanging by one hand. If she were only a boy, what a magnificent athlete he could make of her.

The sun was up before five o’clock and so were the Custers. They hurried through the chores so they could get to town and let Lucy deliver a May basket to her teacher. Rachel had gone through school and college with Alice Liljeqvist, and she could not understand why Lucy hated her so. When her own life seemed barren, Rachel sometimes thought of Alice living in that big house with her aging mother, teaching the children of all her friends.

Lucy understood perfectly well why her mother was always having her take little presents to Miss Liljeqvist at Christmas and Easter and other holidays, and she knew those presents did no good at all. She delivered them, but they never made Miss Liljeqvist like her any better.

Her mother sat in the car while she ran up the front steps, hung the basket on the doorknob, knocked, and fled to the back of the house till she heard somebody answer the front door and go back inside again. She waited and heard nothing and decided it would be safe to go back to the car. But all of a sudden she heard Miss Liljeqvist sneaking up behind her, and before she could get away Miss Liljeqvist grabbed her and kissed her, because that was the penalty for being caught giving a May basket. She could hardly believe it.

“She kissed me!” Lucy cried when she got back to the car.

“Why, now, you see?” her mother said positively. “I’ve always tried to tell you how much she likes you. Are you going to like her now?”

Lucy hung her head far out of the window and made the kind of noises she would have made if she were violently carsick.

Rachel changed the subject. “Do you remember your piece for this morning?”

Lucy scraped out some last retching sounds.

“All right, now. That’s enough of that! You’ll have your tonsils all sore again.”

“Good! Then I won’t be able to say that dumb thing at all!” She did seem slightly hoarse. She was always doing odd things with her voice, mimicking frogs and birds and animals. Rachel couldn’t remember that she herself had ever been like that. Lucy was so much like George. Every day Rachel worried a little more about what would ever become of a girl who was like George.…

May Day always began formally with a program at the school. Each of the thirty-odd pupils in the first six grades was given a piece to recite. When her name was called, Lucy stood up and said, “Buttercups and daisies oh the pretty flowers coming ere the springtime to tell of sunny hours while the trees are leafless while the fields are bare buttercups and daisies spring up here and there.”

Rachel couldn’t help being irritated. Lucy had managed a civil amount of expression when she’d gone through it last night. Watching her stand there with her eyes on the floor and listening to her babbling monotone, who would believe that she even had the wit to do an imitation of a frog—or of a person stricken with nausea?

All day long, no matter which way Lucy looked, she saw Miss Liljeqvist. It seemed to her that she spent the whole day hiding, instead of seeing the things she had come to see, and she was standing behind a wagon when they called for the six-to-eight-year-old race. She had to run so far and so fast to get to the starting line that she was too tired to do her best. There were only seven entrants with the whole width of the course to run in, and she realized, at the last minute, that she had run in a long diagonal. She came in third and won an ice cream cone.

Her father yelled at her from the sidelines. “What in the Sam Hill did you think you were doing out there? Don’t you know a straight line is the shortest distance between two points?”

“What?” Lucy said.

“Why didn’t you run in a straight line? A straight line?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Can I go get my ice cream cone now?”

“Go ahead! Go ahead!” He turned to the man standing next to him and said for her to hear as she walked away, “Ain’t that just like a woman?”

She hated to be called a woman! Whenever her father said the word, it always seemed to come at the end of that expression. She began running as fast as she could.

“Look at her go now!” he shouted. “Women!”

She ran the width of the field, across the tracks, and all the way up the street till she got to the Café-Restaurant. She stopped and looked in through the window. The ticket in her hand was a small slip of ordinary yellow construction paper with typing on it. The typing read “Good for ONE 5¢ ice cream cone at Gus and Ruby’s Café-Restaurant.” It didn’t look very valuable. It was just the same kind of paper she sometimes got in school. It was hard to see how it could really take the place of a nickel. Why hadn’t they just given her a nickel? A nickel with a good stout buffalo and a smooth-faced Indian on it. A nickel that would not have wilted and blurred from the moisture in her hand. The more worn the paper looked, the less confidence she had in it. It would be so terribly embarrassing to order the ice cream cone and then have the paper refused. Everybody in the Café-Restaurant would laugh. She decided she would show the ticket first, just to be on the safe side.

There were three big boys sitting at the far end of the counter. One of them went to high school. He was Douglas Sinclair’s big brother. They were all kidding with Annie Finley. She had quit high school to go to work for Gus and Ruby, which was not a good thing to do. Now she wore a lot of lipstick, which was an even worse thing to do. She had a huge amount of fuzzy reddish hair which was curled with a curling iron. She had a long, dirty butcher’s apron gathered around her waist in such a way that she looked very billowy on top, and she was wearing a sleeveless light pink dress. In the darkness of the café, the combination of dress and apron gave Lucy a first upsetting impression that the only clothing on Annie’s breasts and upper parts was the apron bib. Lucy was sure that such a laughing big girl with red grease shining on her lips would never take a yellow ticket in place of a nickel.

One of the boys stood up from his stool on the platform, leaned over the counter, and reached a long arm clear across the dishpan in which Annie was washing some glasses. He pinched her arm, high up among the freckles.

She gave the kind of stupid shriek Lucy often heard high school girls make when they were around boys. He laughed. “Now you’ve got another one! Wh-where do you get all them little s-s-spots, anyhow?” he said.

“None of your business!” she told him.

He leaned forward again. “Be careful!” Annie said. “You’re going to knock over the ketchup. You almost did before. And you almost hit the soda water, too.”

That seemed to give him an idea. He grabbed the big knob and yanked it back. A narrow white stream went hissing into the dishpan. Annie pulled her rag out of a glass and flung it in the boy’s face with a wet splat that sounded exactly like the sound of a cow enriching the pasture.

He wiped the water from his lips with the back of his hand. The hand was big-boned and rolling with tendons, like a man’s.

“S-say, Kewpie-Doll, I ought to f-f-fix you for that!” he stammered.

“You fix me and I’ll fix you again, Mister Smarty!” Annie said.

“Are you going to the d-dance over to the Town Hall tonight?” he wanted to know.

“None of your business!” she said again.

The boy looked down toward the door, as though he was going to do something he knew he shouldn’t do, and wanted to make sure nobody was coming in. Lucy could tell he was surprised to see her.

“Hey, you got a c-customer down there,” he shouted. Lucy hated him. How he would laugh if it turned out that her ticket was no good.

Annie came down and looked over the counter. She had round starey blue eyes, and Lucy saw, up close, that she appeared to have put some brown stuff on her eyelashes.

“This isn’t like a nickel for an ice cream cone, is it?” Lucy asked. She was so sure of the answer that she was already sliding off her stool.

“Lord, yes!” Annie said. “This here must be the fortieth one today!” She took the ticket. “What flavor?”

Lucy had been thinking so hard about the ticket that she had not thought about the flavor. That was a very hard decision. It always took her a long time. But here was the girl, standing with a scoop in one hand and an empty cone in the other. Lucy wanted to go to the ice cream end of the counter and look down into the little wells filled with such wonderful cold colors, and watch the frost misting on the underside of the thick steel lids, but she did not want to go near that boy. It was almost impossible to make up her mind so far away from the ice cream.

“I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you a little bit of all three, shall I?” Annie asked.

That was almost too good to be true. “Okay,” Lucy said.

“I’ll tell the boss,” the worst boy said.

“Mind your own business,” Annie replied.

Lucy noticed the way the boys looked at her as she walked away from them. They certainly acted as though they liked having her talk back the way she did. Lucy couldn’t understand it. She couldn’t imagine a male liking to have a female sass him.

Annie held out the cone in a freckled hand. Lucy still felt as though it must be a gift, since she had not paid any money. If the boss came back he would probably not let her have it. She took the cone and got out as fast as she could. Once in Jamestown she had had an ice cream sandwich, but that was the only other time she had ever had all three flavors at once. That Annie was certainly confusing. She was obviously not a nice girl, but who else would ever dish up a three-flavored ice cream cone?

Lucy remembered, as she walked back to the field, licking first one flavor, then another, how people had talked last spring when the Finleys came. At first everyone had thought they were gypsies. They talked with an odd Southern accent and they were living out of an old truck they parked along the railroad right-of-way. At first people weren’t going to let them get water from the town pumps, thinking that would make them move on in a hurry, but then Mr. Finley had gone and stood with the other men who lined up in front of the Town Hall, waiting to get hired. Then people knew the Finleys were not gypsies, because gypsies never worked—just passed through in their wagons or old trucks, camped for a little while, stole anything they could, and disappeared again.

But Lucy also had bad feelings about the whiskery men who were not gypsies and proved it by standing in the Town Hall line—leaning back and bracing a heel against the dry boards, hooking their thumbs in their pockets, and staring off across the street. She didn’t like to walk past them. Once, when she was only four or five, she had asked a man, “What are you standing there for?” When he hadn’t answered, she had asked again. She had been with her grandfather, and he had grabbed her hand and tried to pull her on past the man. She had pulled back and asked the question once more, loudly.

The man’s face got red. “I’m waiting to get hired,” he said in a funny voice.

“You must never ask those men why they’re standing there!” her grandfather said when they got back to the truck. “That’s an awful thing to do! You made that poor man so embarrassed, and you embarrassed me too! You should have come right along when I took your hand.” Her grandfather stayed mad all the way home, and it was the only time in her life that he had ever been angry with her—absolutely the only time—and that was why she had bad feelings whenever she thought about any man standing in front of the Town Hall.

And another thing about the Finleys—they had come to town only a few days after a terrible thing had happened that everybody was talking about all the time. People had been looking everywhere for a little boy that had been stolen from his house and they had finally found him, but he was dead. She had heard her mother and her grandmother and her great-aunt talking about it and about all the kidnappings that were happening everywhere. Her aunt had told, two or three times, about how she had heard that they found human skin under the little boy’s fingernails. That showed how hard he had fought and fought while he was being killed. He scratched so hard that the skin of the man who killed him was still stuck in his fingernails.

Everybody knew that gypsies were kidnappers. They would steal any child for a little bit of money. And Lucy had never quite got over thinking of the Finleys as gypsies, because of the way they had camped out until they moved into that big falling-down house. They were shiftless, at the very least. They admitted they were on their way to Canada when their truck gave out in Eureka. That was what came of living on a big highway, Lucy’s great-aunt said. You never knew who was coming through your town. Look at all the bums and tramps they had to worry about! It seemed like every day, through the warm months, there would be one at the back door of her house for a handout. That was partly because there was a town pump in her yard where they came for a drink, and partly because she had one of the nicest houses in town and they thought she was made of money.

Lucy spotted her mother and father standing with the crowd listening to the hog-callers. “Sooo—eeee! Sooo—eeee! Hog! Hog! Hog!” Oscar Johnson began his call with drawn-out syllables, and then finished with three short ones, imitating the quick snorting grunts of hogs shoving each other back and forth along the trough. Lester Zimmerman was next, and he went “Ho! Pig pig pig! Ho PIG!”

“Look what Annie Finley gave me!” Lucy said, pulling at her mother’s arm.

“Why, wasn’t that nice!” her mother said.

“But you said she wasn’t a nice girl,” Lucy said.

“Sshh! You mustn’t say that. I never said that. I just said it wasn’t nice to wear so much make-up. I don’t want you to do that, ever.”

Lucy had her face stupidly buried in her ice cream cone when Miss Liljeqvist came sneaking up behind her for the second time that day, and before she knew it she was trapped in the circle of six legs belonging to her mother and her father and her teacher, who went on and on smiling and talking above her, dropping down little sayings to her that she was supposed to think were funny, pretending that Miss Liljeqvist had never kept her in at recess, never made her stand in the cloakroom, never given her a D in Deportment, never made her copy over perfectly good papers because they weren’t neat, never punished her for wiggling a loose tooth with her tongue and making Douglas Sinclair laugh, never written her name on the board for whispering, even when she wasn’t, or never made everybody laugh at her by telling her that she had the messiest desk in the room. Oh, no! None of those things had ever happened, had they? It made Lucy sick, the way grownups always pretended around Miss Liljeqvist.

Four more weeks of school after May Day and another whole year in the third grade. Lucy sometimes even used up a good wish on a first star in order to wish that somebody would marry Miss Liljeqvist, but she couldn’t imagine who ever would. Some day Miss Liljeqvist would be just like Gid and Gad—only worse.

Sunday, May 14

It was a day that would have been too hot except that Lucy still remembered winter so well that no day could be too hot. Besides, the day was the color of spring, not summer. Nothing was brown yet.

They were driving to her grandfather’s house from church and she was watching the wheat grow. The fields that were newly seeded would look black, but if you stared at them without blinking, sometimes they would turn suddenly from black to green. Then you would know that you had seen the wheat grow. You had seen the little green blades from millions and millions of wheat grains all come cutting through the black ground at the same time. It might happen that after you blinked the field would seem black again, but if you squeezed your eyes and stared a minute, you would see that the green was there after all, and the millions of tiny wheat sprouts were growing away.

They were going to have dinner with her grandmother, and the table was set with the beautiful pure white Bavarian china that was kept for Sunday. The kitchen was hot because of the oven, but the dining room was cool and dark, shadowed by the half-drawn blinds. The cherry desk in the corner was closed to cover the pigeon holes full of papers, and the only light spot besides the table itself was the white cloth across the high sideboard. On the cloth stood a big clock in a case made like a building, with pillars holding up a peaked roof and brass lions’ heads looking out—far out, to the North Pole and to Africa.

Lucy liked to go in and stand in the readied room while everybody else was still in the kitchen. The damask cloth hanging halfway to the floor, the massive white dinner plates, the slim gravy boat, the cut-glass relish dish full of precisely arranged dills, bread-and-butter pickles, and spiced beets, the platter waiting for fried chicken—these all had a Sunday cleanness, and a reassuring plenitude after a long starving morning in church.

Her mother was feeding Cathy and her father was talking the way he always did. One realized, when one was far enough away so that his voice didn’t sound quite so loud, that he said some things that were funny.

“Those Hindus,” he said. “A whole country full of grown men wearing diapers. That’s just what they are. There’s a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand of them to every British soldier in the country. Who knows how many? If they can’t get rid of the British by fighting, what kind of yellow-bellies are they? The Mahatma and his hunger strikes! We got rid of the British when we felt like it, didn’t we? Phooey!”

“Well, what do you think of Roosevelt’s new inflation bill?” her grandfather said.

“What’s the matter with that idea?” her father said. “Nine billion dollars the farmers owe in this country—in deflated money. If you don’t want the banks and insurance companies to take over every last farm in the country, what else are you going to do, besides inflate the money again?”

“Well, anyway,” her grandfather said in that voice he used when he was trying to make her father stop shouting, “this parity idea of his is a good one. Getting the farmer back to where he was with the city man before the war.”

“Pshaw!” her father shouted louder than ever. “What does it mean, anyhow? Just words! It won’t have the least little effect on the mess in this country. You wait. It’ll be so bad over here, it’ll make Spain look like a Sunday school picnic!”

“Who are you going to be fighting, George?” her grandfather asked.

“It’s ready,” said her grandmother.

They came in and sat down around the table. They all bowed their heads and shut their eyes, except for her father. Her mother and her grandmother and grandfather said the Lord’s Prayer together.…

Will had a stabbing pain in his abdomen; nevertheless, his mind was fixed on Lucy. He watched her now, staring out past him without seeing him—her eyes fixed on the button in the window as though she were willing herself out of the room—willing herself free and alone in the fields wherever the button floated ahead of her. She was doing something with her eyes, narrowing them and then letting them go out of focus to make the button move one way and then another. He could remember when Stuart had done such tricks with his eyes. Although Lucy had an undeniably strong resemblance to George, Will could see so much of his own line in her too. Her mouth was like Rachel’s and her lips were chapped, the way Rachel’s always used to be. She bit them unconsciously, as she stared out the window. Rachel had done that, too. And Will saw that she seemed to be doomed to wandering the prairie alone during her childhood, like Rachel, with a baby sister too much younger to be company for her—if anybody would ever be company for her. And the world she must enter, if she was ever to be less lonely, was moving always farther away from her.

Will could not see how George and Rachel would ever manage to put her through college, and yet college would be the only door that would ever open to the world she ought to be in. He believed she had the intellect to win a scholarship some day, but by the time that day came, the stubborn, defiant streak she had inherited from George might well have so alienated her teachers that her record would in no way reflect her true capabilities. He knew—now that it was too late for the knowledge to do any good—that something like that had happened to Stuart. He would hate to have Lucy’s chance at college depend on her winning of a scholarship, and so he had drawn up a tentative will that would see both her and Cathy through. But he had never gone ahead and had the will made legal because things had been so uncertain the last few years. He had to think of his children before he thought of his grandchildren, and he had to think of his wife before he thought of his children. He wanted to leave Rose a little more than just his life insurance, and Rachel and Stuart might need the money long before it was time for Lucy to go to college. And there was the possibility of other grandchildren—either Rachel’s or Stuart’s children. He wanted to be fair to them all.

“Who wants to come and help feed the lambs?” he said.

“Me!” Lucy cried. That was another thing he remembered—how Stuart had once been able to come back into a room instantaneously when there was something he wanted to come back for.

They filled three baby bottles with morning’s milk and Will slipped the black nipples over them. When the lambs were smaller, he had warmed the milk, but that wasn’t necessary any more.

One of the lambs was an orphan and the other two were twins their mothers wouldn’t own. Sometimes a ewe did that—just bunted away one of the twins when feeding time came around. In the natural state, that lamb would simply starve to death. Will could never understand such an apparent distortion of the maternal instinct. What other instinct was stronger? He’d always wondered the same thing about those human twins born to Isaac, that other keeper of flocks. Why had the mother loved Jacob and not Esau? In the case of the ewe who pushed away one twin, did she choose between them for such obscure and female reasons as caused Rebekah to choose between Jacob and Esau? Or was there some practical instinct working—did the ewe know that she had only enough milk to raise one lamb, and did her instinct force her to push away the weaker one, even while her mother’s heart bled that the world must be so?

When he thought of Jacob and Esau, Will thought of Rachel and Stuart. It was impossible to believe that he had not loved them equally. Surely, surely, he had loved them equally. Why then, had one of them run away, bitterly renouncing his birthright? Esau had at least cried out to his blind father. (Hast thou but one blessing, my father? Bless me, even me also, O my father!) But never once had Stuart spoken of the things that troubled him. He had simply run away, leaving his father to wonder, for two tortured years, what terrible blindness of his own had driven his son away from him.

They stopped a little way from the sheep shed and the lambs came running, crying in their high baby voices. Will held a bottle in each hand and stuck them through the fence.

He let Lucy have the third bottle. “Now hang on with both hands,” he told her. “When he gets ahold of that, he’ll really wrastle it!”

The bottle throbbed in her hands from the pulsations of his hungry little tongue. His small black jaws never let go, no matter how fast the milk came. She could see it welling and bubbling at the corners of his mouth, but never a drop rolled out on his chin. It wasn’t that way with Cathy at all. She could swallow only so fast, and after that the milk poured down her neck. But the lamb had no trouble at all. He could waggle his little black tail, and do a dance with his twinkling black legs, and butt his head up and down, as though he was nursing his mother, and pull at the bottle—all at the same time. He finished the bottle before Cathy would really have got started, and then he pulled harder than ever.

“Take it away, now,” her grandfather said. “He’ll chew up the nipple.”

Lucy put her fingers next to the little black muzzle and pulled out the nipple. The lamb bleated for more.

“What a little pig you are!” he laughed. “Look how full he is.” The lamb’s stomach was bulged out under its thin baby wool.

“All babies are little pigs, aren’t they?” Lucy said.

“They sure are,” he agreed. “They’d never grow up if they weren’t.”

The smell of the milk had seemed like the soul of the gentle, fertile day itself. Now that the milk was gone, it was as if they still smelled it in the soft south breeze—a wind so soft that it scarcely seemed to be there, but still it was—as elusive but as alive as the pushing wheat in the fields. Lucy said hopefully, “Have you got time to tell me a story?”

She was as hungry as the lambs. He felt it. He wondered how it was that he knew so many things about her, and how it was that sometimes a child could be closer to the parents of its parents than to its own parents. His own grandfather had been full of Indian stories and Civil War stories, and Will now had his grandfather’s medal, hung on a red-and-blue ribbon, packed away in the trunk along with the other Civil War things. That seemed so long ago. Yet his own father was already twelve years old when the war ended, and his own father remembered when Lincoln was shot.

But Lucy was not interested in war stories, nor in Indian battles, though she liked stories about Indians in the forests or on the prairies, so long as there were animals in the stories too. She could not tell him what she expected from his stories, but he had begun to understand that she looked to him to build a plausible passageway between the two disparate and distant places in which she lived.

The two far-apart places were irreconcilable. The first was the world of the little dark house set between its two narrow groves in the prairie. The other was the world in her head that changed and expanded as she grew, and slipped ever farther away from the first. Many years ago, when Rachel was only a year or so older than Lucy, he and Rose had bought the books that now made Lucy’s second world. The set was called The Young Folks’ Treasury, and it ran to twelve thick volumes bound in red, generously adorned with heavy shiny color pages full of beasts, giants, fairies, princesses, and heroes of legends.

After several years of being read to by her mother, Lucy was now working her own way through them. She was presently in the stage where the enchanted world was intertwined with the religious one. She believed that if she only wished hard enough for something, and worked hard enough to deserve it, she would surely get it. She wanted stories from him that proved she was right. She was getting harder and harder to tell stories to.

“Have you got time?” she begged. “It’s Sunday.”

He teased her while he tested such ideas as he could snatch away from the pain that was as determined to destroy his brain as he was determined that it would not. “You won’t let me tell about fairies or princesses. It has to be so it really could happen. But when I tell you about something that really could happen, then you’re sad.”

“Only that one time!” she protested. She looked up at him, pleading for the bridge that could never be built from the real world to the good world.

He leaned back against the fence and hooked a heel over the bottom board. A lamb tried out the black rubber, but found it was not the proper shape. The pain shot through his abdomen again. He loosened his belt another notch but it didn’t seem to help.

“Shall I tell about a lamb?” he asked.

“Yes!” she whooped. He didn’t know anybody who could say yes the way Lucy could. The one sudden syllable was like the whole world crying Joy!

“Well,” he began, “there was a little girl who had a pet lamb. What shall we call the girl?”

“Sally,” Lucy said at once. She was always full of names.

“Sally had wished for a baby lamb for a long time,” Will said.

“Every night she wished on the first star for a lamb. She wasn’t like a little girl I know who wishes every night for a dapple-gray pony like her cousin’s. She just wished for a little baby lamb.

“One night when she went to fetch the cows for her father, she heard a little weak ba-a-a, ba-a-a. She couldn’t imagine where it was coming from because her father didn’t have any sheep. That was why she had never had a baby lamb of her own. She looked all around, but she didn’t see the lamb.”

He had to repeat himself while he thought. Usually he had only to choose between alternatives that waited in his mind, but not today.

“The sound seemed to be coming from a little bit above her in the gulch. She looked up, but she still couldn’t see anything. She climbed up the side of the ravine a little ways and she saw a dark spot in the side of it. It was a tiny little cave! She was so surprised! She had never seen that cave there before. And then she saw that there really was a lamb lying in the cave, but it was a black lamb—all black, not just feet and muzzle and tail. That was why she couldn’t see it in the cave.

“She wondered how the little lamb had ever got there. When it saw her it tried to stand up, but it had a sore foot, and it stumbled and fell back down again. She picked it up and it didn’t even try to wiggle out of her arms. It wasn’t afraid of her at all. It knew she wanted to help it.”

“Was it very heavy for her?” Lucy asked.

“Yes, it was. It was all she could do to carry it, because she was not a very big girl. I doubt if she was as strong as you are, either. But she carried it all the way to where the cows were grazing and then home. When her father saw her bringing in the lamb, he was very surprised. But he said that if she would take care of it she could keep it. He even built a little house for it, inside a little fence. He looked at its foot and said it had been cut on the barbed wire but it would get better. So Sally fed the little black lamb and soon it was well, and it could run and jump like any lamb. In fact, it got so it could jump over its little fence, and then it would run away. Sally thought it looked so funny jumping over its fence that she would laugh and chase after it, and she begged her father not to make the fence higher.

“So, one day the lamb ran very far away, and this time Sally looked and looked, and couldn’t find him. He was a real black sheep, that little lamb. He was really a bad little egg.” He repeated again, waiting for some more story to come. Where did the lamb run to? Where? Where?

“Sally looked all day long. She didn’t notice the sky getting darker and darker and darker, until it was almost as black as her little lamb. Her mother had told her always to run right home when the sky got black like that, and to watch for a tornado. Her mother had told her that if she ever saw a tornado coming along, she should not even try to get home, but lie down in the lowest spot she could find and hang on to something. If she was out in the stubble, she should just hang on to that. But Sally had forgotten that, because she was so worried about her lamb.

“So she kept on wandering around and calling for her lamb while the clouds got bigger and blacker. Suddenly she felt the tornado come and grab her right up, and the next thing she knew, she was blowing around and around with all the other things it had picked up, but she couldn’t see any of them because it was so black.

“Now, you know, I’ve seen a tornado do awful queer things. You just can’t believe it till you see it. Once right down here in Jimtown a tornado took a roof off one house and set it down again, just right! on another house. Down South, where they have a lot more tornadoes than we do here, the wind does a lot of crazy things. You know, just last week they had some storms down there that killed a lot of people, they were so bad. And yet the wind lifted up one man right out of his house and carried him prit-near two blocks away and set him down again, just as pretty as you please. Didn’t hurt him a bit. And I’ve seen, myself, back in Indiana, a straw that went through an oak door two inches thick. It never even bent or broke on account of hitting the door so fast and so hard. Just went clean through it—just like that!”

“What happened to Sally?” Lucy said.

“Well, sir, just the same thing that happened to that fellow down in Kansas. That tornado picked her up and whirled her around and around and set her back down again, about a mile away, just as easy as pie.

“And guess who had been there with her, twirling around in the big black tornado all the time, so coal-black she never saw him at all?”

“The lamb!” Lucy cried.

“Right!” Will said triumphantly. He had feared she wouldn’t accept the idea. He knew he just wasn’t up to snuff. “And the tornado set him down, too, just as nice as could be. And she ran over to him and she saw that he had got himself all tangled up in something up there in the tornado. And I bet you can’t guess what it was!” He thought desperately.

“Well, it was a—a—a …” Now was the time to try some magic, but it would have to be probable magic. “It was a golden bridle—just right for a pony. She untangled his little woolly black legs from it. It was gold, all right. It glittered and glittered. It was heavy, too. But she ran all the way home with it. The little lamb ran right behind her. He had learned his lesson, you just bet. He wasn’t going to run away any more!

“And when she showed the bridle to her father, he got a wonderful idea. He said, ‘Say, Sally, I bet we could find some rich person who would buy this bridle. Then I bet there would be enough to buy you a pony, with a regular saddle and bridle. What do you say? Should we put an ad in the paper?’ And sure enough, some rich man came and bought the bridle, and Sally’s father took her to the horse auction and they came home with the prettiest little dapple-gray pony you ever saw. So then Sally had both a lamb and a pony, and it was all because of her bad little lamb that she got a pony!”

He felt deeply relieved at the smile she gave him. She had not been disappointed. Her smile, when she was really happy, was like her yes. There was no other smile like it.

“Let’s go get the checkers and have a game out here in the sunshine, shall we?” he asked. It wasn’t polite to leave the others for so long, but he just felt too blamed bad to get back into an argument.

“I tell you what.” He had an even better idea. “I’ll just be out here looking after the ewes while you take the bottles back in and fetch the board and checkers.”

“Okay!” she said. She was running before she finished the word. He stood watching her and thinking again how easy it was for a child to change worlds. Very soon she would reach the age where she would be trying to make the leap between her worlds all by herself, just as she already didn’t need to hold his hand any more when they walked in town, though she always did.

He thought about how small her hand still was, and how sharp her little knuckles felt when he pressed his thumb over them. She had not stopped fighting against her solitude; that was why she still wanted to take his hand when they walked in town.

He wondered when she would surrender to solitude, as Rachel and Stuart had, so that it would become necessary to her. For many years he had wondered if everybody’s soul had to be defined by solitude after a certain stage of maturity, or if it was only prairie people who almost always grew that way.

Saturday, May 27

It was summer and school had been let out the day before. George was seeding the last of the Ceres. A good part of it in his first field was up already. It looked as though it was going to make a fine stand. Still, he didn’t trust Adolph as far as he could throw a steer by the tail. He knew Adolph would get away with anything he thought he could. He could only hope that the seed had been properly treated for smut. It was too late now to do anything about it if it hadn’t. He had paid for treated wheat, but there would be no way to come back on Adolph if it became clear that he had lied, except to take it out of his hide. There were so many crooks a man could never get at.

That big crook J. P. Morgan, for example. The Democratic Senate Committee had been investigating him this whole week, and proving what any sensible man had known for a long time—that if a crook was only a big enough crook, he could get away with anything. Even Calvin Coolidge had been in on Morgan’s stock market manipulations—just two or three months before the crash back in 1929. Ah, but Morgan could dole out a little money here and there, and people thought he was a wonderful philanthropist—“a builder.”

Nevertheless, George knew that things were going to change. He liked to remember what Lincoln had said about how nobody could fool all of the people all of the time. The time was coming—the time when the majority of the people would no longer be fooled. The time was nearly here when there would be enough men like himself to make a stand. Then all of those Wall Street jackals could damn well run to their hypocritical churches and sit and quake in their plush high-priced pews. The little men would be waiting for them outside.

And when the little men were finished, there would be a new economic system. Countless paper transactions could no longer transform this wheat he seeded here in this solid earth to paper wealth that enabled speculators from New York and Chicago to possess even the government without shedding a drop of sweat.

A flock of crows scratched busily at a safe distance behind him. These were the robbers he could shoot. The idea of having seed wheat go straight from the drill box into a crow’s gizzard was almost more than he could tolerate. He stopped the team and took his shotgun from a set of hooks he had screwed into the drill. He blasted both barrels into the crows and a screaming “Caw! Caw! Caw!” mocked him from behind. He whirled around with the gun and saw Lester Zimmerman sitting on his wagon box, laughing.

“You’re a lucky bastard! If I’d had a shell left in here you’d be full of shot right now!” George roared.

“Caw! Caw!” Lester answered.

George went over to the road and leaned on the wagon. He pushed his hat back on his wet forehead. “In fact, Lester, you use up more luck every week than I’ve ever had in my whole life. That old barn of yours gets a worse lean to it every day. If I was to walk in that thing it’d fall down on me before I so much as picked up a milk stool. But I’ll tell you one thing—if I was you and I was in there milking, I’d never aim a sneeze at that south side. Now, for a small fee, I’d jack that thing up for you.” He bowed. “You see before you an expert with a building jack.”

“To hell with you!” Lester said. “You’ll never catch me fixing up my place for no landlord! And if he goes ahead and kicks me offa there, I’ll fix it so’s that old barn will fall right on his bald pate. That reminds me—how come you got all that hair everywhere but on the top of your head? If a redheaded man gets bald, is he still mean?”

“Just twice as mean,” George assured him. “By the time I lose the last hair up here, there isn’t one of you boys that’ll dare look cross-eyed at me.”

Lester started up his team. “I’m gonna butcher that old Jersey bull this fall. He ain’t worth feeding through the winter. You wanta buy a little piece of hide to cover your scalp? It’ll just match. And one of you’s about as ornery as the other.”

“I got a brain that keeps my scalp warm!” George shouted after him.

George went back to the field that seemed no more and no less empty than before. The sounds of his neighbor moving away down the road were lost in the sounds that accompanied him around the field—the scraping and creaking of machinery, the monotonous thudding of the sixteen thick hoofs, and the calls of birds and insects. There were so many sounds more indigenous to the prairie than the sound of human speech. By the time he had made one round of the field he no longer heard any echoes of his conversation at all, and he began to sing to himself and the horses.

They were the songs he had heard his own father sing in the field—about the bulldog on the bank and the bullfrog in the pond, the mockingbird, the Red River Valley, and the goose that died with a toothache in her head. He often sang a song about the railroads:

He liked all the songs of American soldiers too, and he would march along to “Yankee Doodle” or “Dixie” or “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” hearing in his head the quick piercing notes of the fife playing above the drums and horns in a parade—martially gay and painful. “How I loved that gal, that pretty little gal—The girl I left be-ee-hind me!”

That was the song played by the band of the Seventh Cavalry as Colonel Custer rode out of Fort Abraham Lincoln, heading for the draw above the Little Big Horn River. Custer’s widow had died just a few days ago. She was ninety-one years old, and she had been a widow for fifty-seven years. The Sun had carried a long piece about her and the fort and the massacre, and how the steamboat Far West had come out of the Yellowstone country and down the Missouri to bring the news to Libby Custer and the other wives waiting at the fort. George had always been proud to be named after the Boy General, and he always paid particular attention to anything he came across in his reading that had to do with him.

Like his namesake, George was a gambler. Nobody could farm that country without being a gambler. One good year, with enough moisture, plus high prices in the fall—that was all it took to make up for six or seven years of failure. There were smart gamblers and stupid gamblers, but every North Dakota farmer was a gambler, and even the smartest one reached a point, every season, where all he could do was stand and watch what happened to his crop like a man watching the spinning of a gambling wheel constructed in Hell. When several good years came along in a row, he cashed in on his lucky streak and put his winnings back into the game, like any other sporting adventurer, by investing in new buildings, new machinery, more stock, more land.

But when the good years came even farther apart than the seven promised in the Bible, perhaps he failed utterly. Then he watched the last days of the earth, while plague after plague was unloosed upon him, with the hailstones as heavy as cannon balls, and the great star falling on the fountains of waters and scorching his unrepentant head, and the grasshoppers as big as horses, with breastplates of iron. Then he stood in the midst of the ruin, smelling the smoke from the bottomless pit, hearing the echoes of the last thunder and the final trumpet blasts, and he did not repent of the work of his hands. He was proud of having played out the game, even though his name be blotted out of the book of life. He was brokenhearted and wounded with the kind of permanent wounds that only the proud sustain, but still he was proud. If he had it to do all over again, he would choose to gamble again.

Lucy sat on the rough, hot boards of the porch. She was all ready to go to town, having sponged off her chest and legs and put on a clean pair of shorts. She was waiting for her mother to finish putting the bread to rise so they could leave. The sun flashed from a rust-free spot on the Ford and in line with that flash was another flash, fifty yards away at the edge of the grove.

She took a languid step from the porch, wondering if she had time for an investigation before the car left for town. She fixed her eyes on the flash and she saw it move as sun reflections never did. She walked quickly but quietly toward it. She stopped when she saw what it was—a straying young jack rabbit, running in short crouching steps, snuffing at the unfamiliar ground.

She wetted a finger and held it up—a trick she had read in one of her mother’s Ernest Thompson Seton books. Good—the rabbit was upwind from her. She was sure she could catch it, for it was hardly more than a baby. It kept its long, kangaroo-like hind legs in tight circles against its flanks, the way rabbits were always drawn in books. She wondered if it was hurt, and thought of how she would love it and pet it and feed it and make it well again.

At last she was so close that her shadow, short as it was in the late-morning sun, passed blackly over the baby’s haunches and turned the circles of brindled fur into miniatures of the galvanic hind legs on a full-grown jack rabbit. It leapt away in short, strong jumps, but it went in a fatal direction. She forced it away from the shelter of the grove, making it dart back and forth in front of her, expending valuable energy, before it struck off across the yard, heading for the wheat fields.

If God had just reached down and suspended the rabbit’s motion for only an instant, she could have caught it easily, for she was always so close that she needed just an extra moment to bend forward, stretch her arm to the ground, and scoop it up. Instead, they went all the way across the yard with neither gaining on the other. As they veered past the house she used the last breath she could spare to shout at the open kitchen window, “I’m catching a rabbit! Don’t go without me!”

Her legs began to ache and something hot swelled and swelled inside her head. But the little rabbit, too, was exhausted and frantic. He no longer tried for distance, but only for deception. He would dart to one side and freeze next to an extra-large clod or a rock, and then, when he saw her stumbling shadow, spring off to find another bit of hopeless shelter.

She fell, finally, and if he had been wise enough to hop away immediately, he could have got the head start he needed. Instead, he remained in his last hiding place, shrunk into the smallest possible ball of grayish, white-tipped hairs, and she closed her hand over his back just as he started to jump away.

He uttered a frightful sound halfway between a squeal and a whistle. The claws of his little hind foot dug into her wrist and scraped down her arm. When the foot came to her elbow, it pushed against her upper arm and catapulted him into the air.

She stood watching him go, scarcely noticing that the blood was beginning to fill the long white scratches, wondering why it was that wild things were so afraid of people. Why didn’t he know—why wasn’t there some way to tell him that she wished only to take care of him and keep him for her own? It was always the same. She had caught wild things before. Once she had followed a little white-breasted nuthatch all over the grove for half the morning. She managed to touch its wings once or twice, but it always flew away to the bottom of another tree and started working its way up the trunk, pecking at the bark with its tiny beak. Perhaps at last it got used to her, for it ignored her an extra split second and she captured it. But when it was in her hands, fluttering its wings and scrabbling its many wire-sharp toes against her palms, she let it go because of her own fright.

It was even worse the time she tried to lift a woodpecker baby out of its mysterious hiding place. She waited till she saw the adult flicker fly out of the hollow tree, and then she stuck her hand inside the hole to feel in the nest. Her defenseless arm was horrifyingly attacked by a beak that drilled holes in wood, and when she finally got her hand out of the hole, another grown bird shot straight into her face. After she got over being scared, she did remember something about the secret house in the hollow tree—it was so hot in there, from the bodies of the birds. And there was still the smell of warm feathers and down-covered babies clinging to her own skin.

It was always the same. She could catch almost anything she went after, if she only tried enough times, but once she caught it she could never hang on to it.

She sat down on the ground and watched the blood still oozing in the scratches. A person would never think a baby rabbit could have such strong legs or such long toenails. Why hadn’t she hung on to him? She could have tamed him—she knew she could have.

For two years she had been trying to catch a rabbit, and now that she had finally caught one, what had she done? Let him go again!

Rachel was in a hurry to leave for town and get back in time to bake the bread. When she looked out the window, the two running specks were so far away that she thought Lucy must have decided she would rather chase the rabbit than go to town. She took off her apron, changed the baby, and put her into the car.

On the way to town she began to wonder if Lucy had caught the rabbit and what in the world they would do with it if she had. Lucy would never be persuaded to let it go and George would never consent to feeding and keeping an animal that was one of his worst enemies.

It seemed to her that the smallest events had a ridiculous way of juxtaposing themselves with other small events so that the confluence of trivialities became suddenly a bitter maelstrom involving them all. She was always caught in the center, trying to steer each disputant out again, still clinging to whatever splinter of righteousness he had ridden into the maelstrom in the first place. If George did allow Lucy to keep the rabbit till it was full-grown, he would surely never hear of letting it go again to reproduce itself. He would shoot it, as he shot scores of rabbits every winter, for the skins and for dog meat.

The rabbit would not be so attractive to Lucy after it was grownup, but she would certainly never be able to resign herself to having it killed. George and Lucy would both be right and they would both look to her to uphold their respective cases. She did not at all enjoy being an arbitrator. It was not a job she had ever been cut out to do, but she was continually caught in the battles of these two who would never have been brought together if it were not for her. The battles were always part of her responsibility. She hoped the rabbit would escape, but she ached for Lucy’s disappointment.

If only she had got the bread set ten minutes earlier, they would have been gone by the time the rabbit wandered into the yard. Sometimes her life seemed ruled by such meaningless little accidents of time and place. How difficult it was to see what rational purpose such a situation as this could serve in a rational existence. Yet one must believe that either everything or nothing had a rational purpose.

In the store she seated the baby on the counter and shuffled through her purse for her list. The list was not to keep her from forgetting something, but to keep her from buying anything that was not essential. Herman went off to collect the things on it while she stayed with Cathy.

Propped on one of the dusty shelves behind the counter, looking even grindier than the shelf it sat upon, was a stuffed pink rabbit that had sat there since long before Easter. It was lined up with the other punchboard prizes, and she had scarcely noticed it before.

When Herman came back to dump a sack of sugar against the front of the counter, she said casually, “Which of these boards do you punch for that rabbit up there?”

“Why it’s right here, Mrs. Custer,” he said. “People just seemed to quit punching on it. But you can see for yourself how good the chances are. Why there ain’t more than fifty-sixty punches left on it. Look here! There’s only five of ’em in this here section. Punch out all five and you get …” He rummaged around till he found a greasy sheet of cardboard.

“The last punch in each section wins a pound of Kissinger’s Candy Easter Eggs. … I reckon them Easter eggs are melted all together, but I could throw in a Hershey bar if you was to punch out the five.”

“Oh, no! I just meant I wondered which board the rabbit was on, that’s all. I couldn’t be buying candy like that.”

“Oh, well,” said Herman. He went back to get the Bull Durham and the canned pears. Rachel picked up the sheet with the prize numbers listed on it and studied it.

“Cuddly Easter Bunny,” it read. “#8510.”

She picked up the board with the little punching key dangling from its string. Something would guide her fingers and make her put that key in the right hole. For once an accident of time would be good—it would be time for the pink rabbit to be won.

She pushed the key into a tiny tinfoil seal and drove it firmly through the board. The curled-up paper with its fateful number dropped on the counter. She picked it up. #5305. She had not had the slightest idea that she would lose. In fact, it hadn’t seemed like gambling at all when she was pushing the key through the board—because she had believed, in that instant, that she was pushing out the rabbit’s number. She had thrown away a whole nickel. How often, this summer, would she have to tell Lucy there was no nickel for an ice cream cone? She couldn’t believe she had done it.

Herman came back with the last of the groceries and added them all up. “Four dollars and thirty-seven cents,” he said. “Say, Mrs. Custer, I could maybe sell you that rabbit cheap. It ain’t very new-lookin’ any more. Then I could put the money you give me on another prize when somebody punched out that rabbit.”

She knew she must be blushing. “Oh, that’s all right, Mr. Schlaht. I was just looking at it.… Oh, and add a nickel to that bill, will you? I just took a punch for fun.”

He stared at her. “Well, where’s the punch? You might’ve won something even better than the rabbit.”

“Oh, no!” she cried. “It was just for fun!”

She couldn’t bear to face him any longer. She started toward the door.

“But you never —”

“I’ll run ahead and open the car door for you, so you can bring out the sugar,” she said.

She followed him back into the store, swept the sack of groceries off the counter, and fled.

Herman had found the number she punched and unrolled it. “Hey!” he called. “Hey, you won a prize! Your number’s here in this here red prize section!”

He held up the tiny bit of paper, thinking she could not hear him.

“Hey, you won a free punch!” He stood in the door yelling at her, shaping his lips to help her make out what he was saying.

She shook her head at him and drove off.

When she got home, George was down at the house waiting to help her unload and to be fed his dinner. He took the can of pears out of the sack. It was one of the few things that bore a trademark, because most of the staples came from Herman’s bulk bins and sacks. He looked at the label.

“What did you buy these pears for?” he demanded.

“Why? I just thought it would be nice to have a can of fruit on hand. I’m all out of my own, till the fruit comes in again.

“Oh, now, Rachel, you know that’s not what I mean! You know it’s not the pears; it’s the principle of the thing. Why did you buy this brand?”

“Why, I never even saw it,” she said. “Herman reached it down for me and I …”

“Herman!” George exclaimed. “Boy, how dumb can he get! What’s he doing, carrying this big store stuff anyhow? He’s just cutting his own throat, that’s all. These chain stores would be happy if they could put every little fellow in the country out of business. They own millions of acres right now. They crowd out the little guys and then they let the little guys come back and work for them — for whatever they want to pay, that is. It’s just a slow way to starve, that’s all. That’s what the Finleys were doing before they decided to try and get to Canada—picking tomatoes down in Indiana on a big company farm.”

“Did Lucy catch the rabbit?” Rachel asked.

“Yeah, she caught it all right. You’ll probably have a fit when you see how it scratched her—you’ll have her dead from lockjaw or gangrene.”

“What happened!”

“Nothing!” he retorted. “She caught him and he kicked her and she let him go, that’s all. It’s a good thing for her, too. I can just see myself growing feed for a damned rabbit!”

“Where is she?” Rachel said.

“Oh, she’ll be along. She’s still out roaming around and pouting over it. Boy, when I was that age I sure wasn’t out using up good energy on such foolishness, I can tell you that! My old man would have had me out with the hoe, planting potatoes! It’s getting drier by the day. Quicker I get everything in, the better chance it has.”

“Will you call her to dinner?” Rachel asked.

George walked around the house to the west side and beamed his voice toward the fields. Rachel thought perhaps it had been a good accident after all when she didn’t win the rabbit. How in the world would George have taken to that?

Lucy was furious at missing a trip to town, and she would not talk when she came in.

“Lower lip’s a mile long,” George observed acidly.

“Why, honey, you should have put something on that right away!” Rachel said. “Come over here to the window and let me look at it in the light. Does it hurt a lot?”

Lucy stared away without speaking.

“You answer your mother when she asks you a question or you’ll eat your meals standing up for a week!” George shouted.

“No,” Lucy said defiantly.

“As soon as I slice the potatoes to fry, I’ll fix it,” Rachel said.

Lucy did enjoy the big bandage. It made her feel that perhaps, after all, she had fought a good fight. After dinner she poked about in the cupboard to see what was new from her mother’s shopping. She could always hope that there would be a tiny white sack there with a little candy in it.

“Why didn’t you bring me some candy, for leaving me at home?” she said.

“Oh, honey, I forgot! I was thinking of so many things!” (The nickel—the whole nickel she had wasted!)

Rachel fixed her one of her candy substitutes—dry uncooked oatmeal mixed with several teaspoons of sugar in a tin measuring cup—Lucy always insisted on the tin cup. She went out and sat on the porch to eat it, staring off at the edge of the woods where she had first seen the rabbit—brooding.

Each vertebra, it seemed to Rachel, was painfully sharp along the round of Lucy’s drooping back. How could there be any resistance in such a spare body? What if she should get an infection? She would be gone, before they had time to get her to a doctor. Why was her cheek so flushed and why was she so listless? She might very well be coming down with blood poisoning. Stuart had had it once, when he was about fourteen. That had been just a scratch, too. He didn’t even know how he got it. He had almost died, and he was a husky boy then, not tall yet, the way he got later, but with a bit of early adolescent fat still on him—much, much more to spare than Lucy had. His whole arm had become horribly red and swollen, and red lines ran down it and up his shoulder. They had saved him, but just barely. He kept a fever for over a week.

She went out on the porch. “Let me feel your forehead,” she said. Lucy lifted her face. She seemed hot, Rachel thought. “Now let’s look at your arm.” It seemed very red.

George came down for the new package of Bull Durham which he had forgotten. “I’m worried about Lucy’s arm,” Rachel told him.

“Oh, pshaw! You just look for trouble, don’t you?” he said.

“No, I don’t! I wouldn’t have to look for it if you would look a little more! You should have put something on that as soon as it happened!”

“I didn’t even know when it happened,” he protested.

“Well, and just why didn’t you? Because you’ve trained her never to say when she’s hurt. You’ve shamed her into not talking about how bad she may feel. You tell her to be like an Indian—no matter if she’s dying! Well, she’s not an Indian. Maybe Indians didn’t care if their children died from blood poisoning, but I do!”

“Now, then, just what are you trying to say, Rachel? You know I care what happens to her just as much as you do! It’s just that I can’t stand a sissy, and I’m not going to let you turn her into one!”

“It’s not sissy to complain when you have something wrong with you and you need help! If Stuart hadn’t let Dad know when his arm first started to hurt, he’d be dead by now. Just don’t forget what happened to Danny McNelis! All because his father had beaten it into him never to talk about how he felt!”

It was no use arguing with her, once she brought up Danny McNelis. George put down the dipper he had been drinking out of. “All right, pack her up and drive her thirty miles to Jimtown and use all that gas and pay some damn doctor two dollars to pour some iodine on her and send you home!”

Listening from the porch, Lucy did feel a little sick thinking about what happened to Danny McNelis last year. When he came to school that morning, he had not looked well. Even Miss Liljeqvist had noticed it and asked him if he wanted to go home. He said no, he felt fine. All day long he got whiter and whiter. In the afternoon he fainted and fell out of his desk. His father came then and took him to Jamestown. That night Danny died from appendicitis. And Danny’s father, though he felt so awful, still was very proud of the way Danny had acted. Lucy often heard him talking over at the store. “Never a single word did he say! Can you beat that?” Danny’s father would ask.

But Lucy’s mother had told her afterwards that if Danny’s father had not been so set on making a little boy act like a tough grown man, Danny might still be alive. It certainly made more sense to say when you had a bad stomachache, and never mind if your father called you a sissy or not. Fathers were not always right, were they?

It was going to be another hot summer, Rose thought. Here it was still May, and only midmorning, and the sun beating on the tarred roof of the chicken house had already made the air impossible. She would have begun the cleaning much earlier if she had known the day would turn this way. The stench was so strong it hurt her nose. She leaned against the door frame, still sticky with the creosote they had sprayed to get rid of the mites. The fumes of it grew more intense in the heat, like the chicken manure, but a hot breeze brought unpolluted air to her.

What ails me, anyway? There’s nothing wrong with you! What ails you for thinking something’s wrong? You haven’t changed a bit since you were ten years old. You’ve had fifty-four years to learn how to clean a chicken house without dirtying your mind as much as your rubbers, and still you can’t do it. Just think of what you’ve been thinking in there. How much you hate chickens. How much you hate to wash eggs. How much you hate to butcher chickens and smell the filthy brown of their warm intestines in your hand. How you wouldn’t care a bit if the chicken thieves took every last hen in this place the next time they come. How you could watch the whole flock get coccidiosis and die slowly and miserably and never feel a qualm of sympathy. Yes, how you could watch them all, and God knows, nothing can look as sick and pitiful as a chicken.

Your own father, Rose Stuart, would have punished you with his buggy whip for saying such thoughts aloud. Is it any better, now that you’re fifty-four years old, to say them to yourself? Now that there is no one to punish you but God? Should you not be thankful, every minute of your life, that you have not had to live the life of your mother and to bear eleven children in a sod hut to a man who would not control either his wicked temper or his evil desires? And should a woman who has been married for thirty-six years, Rose Shepard, be still remembering a dead father’s cruelty—and, far worse, should she be remembering him as if she had not forgiven him long ago? Should there be any hatred in a Christian woman who has had fifty-four years to learn to follow Christ?

You may well ask, Rose Stuart, what ails you when you let your mind be filled all morning with complaints and vicious thoughts. You should thank God for every egg you wash and every chicken you eat. People are starving to death everywhere in the world. You should be on your knees before God right here in this stinking manure, thanking Him that you do not have to steal the chickens you eat.

Oh, God forgive me, God forgive me. I don’t hate him any more. No, and I don’t hate the chickens. Don’t let the things come into my head. How do they come there when I have continually commanded them to stay away, when I have prayed for strength to fight them away? It’s the smell; the smell becomes my brain. Now here I am, already pitying myself again, excusing myself, and yet a whole lifetime was given to me so that I could learn gratitude. Forgive me, forgive me.

My back is worse than usual today. That must be what ails me. What was he thinking of, my father David Stuart, when he set me to drawing buckets of water from the deep well, hand over hand, before I was eight years old? Didn’t he know it would bend me so I would never be straight again? He didn’t care, that was all. Stop, stop, stop! I’ve had good health all my life. My back is my only cross and I have always been able to work. What if I had been asked to bear tuberculosis or paralysis or the loss of a limb or insanity? Can I not ever, ever learn to be grateful? I have had enough air. The more I breathe, the more my mind disobeys.

She set to work again, loosening the droppings with her hoe and scraping them into shovel-sized piles. When she had to stop to breathe again, she shoveled a load into the wheelbarrow and took it to the compost pile in the orchard.

They had so carefully cultivated and protected that little orchard. Will had dug a fence deep into the ground to keep out the gophers and other burrowers that would have chewed the roots of the baby trees. They had done everything they could to nurture and guard it; yet a predestined force had prevailed over it—the same force that had overtaken Stuart, when he had gone on a lark with some other boys and they got hold of some bootleg liquor. There was only one way to explain the force. There was only one reason why there should be a difference between what people knew was right and what people did. There was a force far stronger than mortals which intervened between them and their consciences, and that force was Satan.

The burning hellish years had come. Never before had the world been so evil. The thousand-year reign of the Beast had begun, and the mark of the Beast was on all who bought and sold, as it said in the Bible—for if the mark of the Beast had not been on men during these last years when governors and judges and senators had been the open and avowed friends of the bootleggers—even pallbearers, yes pallbearers, for bootleggers who had been shot by other bootleggers—if the protecting mark of the Beast was not on those men, then why had the world not risen up and overwhelmed them?

This drought that slowly stifled the orchard—it was only one of the many symptoms that the Thousand Years had begun. Everywhere among the great and powerful of the earth there was fornication, idolatry, drunkenness, and blasphemy. And her own son had run away into that doomed world—for two years he had been there—dragged there by those whose greed drove them to damn the souls of boys.

She hurried back to the chicken house to finish the cleaning and scatter new straw before she should have to go in to begin Will’s dinner. A hen clucked at her from a nest. It was a warning all too easy to interpret this time of the year. The hen would have to be captured and put in a breaking-up coop before it managed to sneak off and make a nest in the weeds where coyotes would get the eggs.

She leaned her hoe against the wall and walked slowly around the roosting poles. The hen became louder and more quarrelsome. She wished she had her heavy leather gloves. It bothered her to be pecked by a chicken. She shot her hand beneath the warm feathers to grasp for the horny legs. Instead of pecking and standing its ground as she expected it to do, the hen half jumped, half flew at her face, with a startling rush of feathers and venomous exclamations. In her surprise, she missed her chance and the chicken squawked past her and thudded on the floor.

Rose got to the door first and slammed it shut. The hen retreated under the roosting bars and fluffed the feathers on her neck and spread her wings. She stalked about under the poles, uttering low wrathful sounds, and glaring from her red-rimmed, unblinking eyes.

Rose pushed at her with the hoe. The hen shouted savagely from a wide-open beak and zig-zagged under the poles, always out of reach.

Finally Rose stooped quickly, doubled herself under the poles, grabbed a leg, and straightened up too soon, knocking her head against the befouled roost. Dizzy from her sudden move and the blow on the back of her head, she staggered to the door, dangling the screeching chicken from her hand. The hen battled with her wings till Rose flung her through the door of the first empty coop. One more hen that would have to be fed and watered separately for a week or more while she sat on the slats until the air circulating under her superheated breast cooled her nesting ardor. There was no use taking a setting hen out of the breaking-up coop until she had stopped clucking for a couple of days. So long as she clucked, her feeble mind was on nothing but hatching eggs.

Rose went back to her scraping, still dizzy and still determined to be done with this job before she went in to clean herself up and peel the potatoes.

Will wanted to finish drilling his flax field before he went in for dinner, but he stopped the Fordson for a minute anyway, and climbed down from it to lean against the drill box and rest.

Even standing on the ground he still felt the vibrations of the tractor, like a sailor without his land legs. The engine missed badly. He’d have to have it gone over as soon as he could spare it for a day or two. Maybe George could find the time to fix it. It would be a way to put a little cash into George’s two big proud fists. He unscrewed the top of the tank behind the seat and poured gas into it from the five-gallon can stored on the tractor platform. The engine continued to sputter and he thought he better get going again before it stalled and died on him. He didn’t want to have to crank it.

He did finish the field, pushing himself and the Fordson hard, and then he rode the tractor in and left it standing in the shade of the barn. Thirty feet above him, the galvanized blades of the windmill spun a blurred aureole from the beams of the sun.

Everything was in a straight line—the sun with its invisible ring of blazing million-mile petals, the tin flower of the windmill blooming with hot light, the point of the well pipe four hundred feet below the revolving blades, and the middle of the earth. He and his windmill were suspended between two fires—the fire ninety-three million miles away in frigid space and the fire at the core of the planet.

The water came up warm from the well, because it tapped a warm spring in the earth. Rose had never been satisfied with the well. It looked to her as though the men who drilled it had simply been trying to get as much money as they could. They had gone through vein after vein of refreshing, cool water, charging more for each foot they drilled, until they struck this warm, salty, heavy stuff under the layers of rock and clay and sand and gravel. But the supply was inexhaustible. As the drought got worse and worse, Will was more and more thankful that those well-drillers had tried to skin him. It just went to show how often a bad turn really worked out for the best.

Before he had got used to the sharpness of the water, it had only made him the more thirsty when he drank it, but he had learned to like it and so had his family. They had a big cement cistern under the house from which they could pump fresh cold water into the kitchen all year round if only they got enough snow and rain during the wet months. The gutters along the roof caught the water and piped it down through a charcoal filter into the cistern. Then they pumped it back again through a brick filter. But in the years when the cistern went dry during the summer, they all drank the salty water brought up by the windmill, just as the stock did.

The water was flowing now out of the long, moss-lined cattle trough down the hill to the sheep trough, and then out of the sheep trough into the pasture. He hardly ever shut off the windmill, because he had never had the slightest indication that there was any end to the water supply. Still, with both tanks full and the water evaporating so quickly—there was no use tempting fate. He walked under the tower and pulled on the wire leading to the blades. The flower folded shut, the companionable nagging sounds of the rubbing parts ceased, the long rudder behind the blades creaked and drifted in the wind. For a while the salty river where the well pipe drank was free to flow wherever it would—there below the layers and layers of earth.

He walked away from the flashing iron skeleton of the tower and looked up its narrowing height and the ladder that went to the top of it. He shook his head, remembering the day he had had to go all the way up to fetch Lucy back down from that ladder when she was only four. Stuart had pulled the same stunt, too, when he was about the same age.

Stuart was dark now, but he’d been almost as light-haired as Lucy. The two heads had looked very like each other up there—tiny bright flowers a few feet beneath the great spinning flower. And when he climbed up to them, the two expressions had been the same—absorbed, purposeful, astonishingly innocent. The heads that had looked so tiny, so many miles away, looked so big when he got to the top of the ladder with them. Their chests, their stomachs, their narrow little seats were all smaller around than their heads. How did the baby bodies balance the heavy heads? How did the two-inch fingers grip so confidently the wide flat ladder rungs?

Both of them were wounded and bitterly indignant. Neither of them felt the slightest need to be rescued. They had simply wanted to go as high as they could go and see as much as they could see, and it happened that they were not through exploring when he came after them. He grinned and shook his head again.

Rose was pumping up the kerosene stove for a last jet of heat when she heard Will speak to the gold-and-white collie in the shed. He sloshed water from the basin over his arms and face and then he called in to her.

“You know, Rose, every time I read in the paper about how they’re shipping water all over the country on freight trains just to keep the stock alive, I’m mighty thankful for that salty well out there.”

“I suppose we ought to be,” she said. She was not in the mood for conversation. She was exhausted and she felt like a ninny for having got such a knot on her head because of a stubborn old hen. She had a headache now, but she refused to take an aspirin for an ailment that she had stupidly brought upon herself.

Even his first washing out in the shed had taken enough dust off Will’s face to show the whiteness of it, but Rose did not let on that she noticed it. She never gave in to illness herself and she never encouraged anybody else to. There had been only one time in her life when she had almost given in. That was several years ago, when she got pneumonia. Will had brought the doctor, but it was not because of the doctor that she had lived. It just hadn’t been her time to go, that was all. Her mother and her grandmother had died of pneumonia. Weak lungs ran in the family, and her own bout with pneumonia had just been the first sign that she was going to go the same way the rest had.

“Rose, do you suppose George would have a fit if we gave Lucy a pony for her birthday this summer?”

“Why, Will, I’m sure he’d never let her have it. He’s even mad every time I give Rachel some old thing to make Lucy a coat or a jumper out of. I declare, what ever made you even think of such a thing?”

Will leaned against the wall, still rubbing his hands and forearms with the towel. “Well, maybe it hurts his pride to think that he can’t buy new clothes for Lucy. Maybe he’d look at a pony in a different light.”

“Everything hurts his pride,” Rose said. “No, I’m sure he wouldn’t hear of it. It would just make trouble.”

“I wish there was some way for her to have a pony,” Will said wistfully. “Wouldn’t it be fun to watch her come galloping over to visit us? She’s such a wild little cuss. I bet she’d get a horse all lathered up just bringing in the cows.”

Will ought not to encourage Lucy’s turbulent behavior. It seemed to Rose as though she herself was the only one in the family who cared whether or not Lucy grew up to be a lady. Even now it was a fight to get her to wear a dress or to keep her legs together when she was wearing one. Rachel was working too hard to think about what Lucy’s behavior might turn her into, and George and Will both did their best to make a tomboy out of her. It was awful. What would become of the child? After all, she was a girl. Every day she walked more like George, with long, unfeminine strides. “Whistling girls and crowing hens always come to some bad ends,” Rose often told her.

Lucy would either sulk at this or laugh impertinently and whistle loudly. The child was a caution.

“Maybe it’s just as well if she doesn’t have a pony,” Rose said. “She’d probably just kill herself on it.”

“Oh, no,” he argued. “She’s really a pretty sensible little girl, I think. She’d handle a horse all right.”

“Well, George would never hear of it and you know it. Come and eat.”

It was one of those smoldering spring days that just kept getting hotter and hotter—a foretaste, Rachel feared, of another scorching summer. In the middle of the afternoon she sent some water to the field with Lucy.

George saw the nimbus of her light hair, brilliant against the black earth, as she came over the rise of the hill toward him. There she was again, with nothing better to do than run over the fields. Why hadn’t she been a boy?

He had not been too disappointed when she was first born, because he realized that one girl was an asset in a farm family; otherwise the mother had a hard time keeping up with the housework and the other babies as they came along. But no other babies had come for six years, and finally, after long months of hope, there was Cathy.

And the older Lucy got, the more it seemed to him that she should have been a boy. She was running so easily now that he could see she had no notion that she was coming up a hill. She brought him a quart of water in a gallon lard pail. A tin cup rolled and thumped around the bottom of the pail.

“You should have carried the cup in your other hand,” he told her. “This way we have to reach our dirty hands down through the drinking water to get it.”

He noticed the way something set in her face and it angered him. A man couldn’t even make a contribution to the practical education of his child any more without having the child act abused. He handed back the drinking cup. She set off for the house again, picking up momentum as she began to go with the hill. When she was twenty or thirty feet away, he called over his shoulder, “Much obliged.” He couldn’t tell whether she heard him or not.

She put the pail in the kitchen and then she went and sat in her swing. She pulled the bandage aside to peek at the end of the longest scratch the rabbit had made. Then she stood up in the swing and began to pump. She wedged her feet against the ropes and shoved mightily. Higher and higher she went, until the long swing ropes stretched out almost parallel to the ground and she stiffened her body to keep from flying out at the forward end of the arc. Then the ropes would snap with a dangerous jolt and she would begin the descent and the backward curve that pulled on her back and legs and made her feel as though her stomach was dropping away behind her. At the other end of the arc she would be suspended for an instant, nearly horizontal, unable to breathe, looking down, like a bird, with just time to wonder before she started down again, if this was the moment she finally was going to fall.

There was a tantalizing branch at the end of the arc. She could almost touch it with the swing board, but not quite. Every day she tried it. Every day, when she had pumped up till the ropes went lax and free for that moment when she knew she might flip clear back over the branch from which the swing hung, she would begin to chant, “Please …” on the way up, “God …” on the way back, “make me …” on the way up again, “a boy,” on the way back. There had to be the awful jerky moments at either end of the arc before she could begin the prayer. One had to be very brave to bear the sight of those ropes buckling and rippling with indecision. Every day she proved to God that she was worthy of being changed into a boy.

Saturday, June 17

Will sat reading the Jamestown Sun in the scuffed brown leather chair he had sat in almost every night for as long as they had lived in the tall yellow house. Rose filled half the living room with a quilting frame. The quilt was a generous double-bed size—five large white squares across and eight down, separated by wide bands of pale green. First she had quilted it all, in two-inch squares standing on their corners like diamonds, then she began stitching in the sunbonnet children. They were pleasingly conventionalized, with long flaring dresses cut from various scraps of print and huge sunbonnets of different solid colors. Even while she worked, Rose thought of how near the end of the world might be, and she wondered why it mattered to her to leave a thing like this behind her. This quilt, when it was finished, would be washed to brighten it after the long hours under her working hands, and then packed away in a trunk. When Lucy was married it would be given to her, and then, when her first daughter was married, to that daughter.

“Well, they’re still after J. P. Morgan,” Will said. “Seems they uncovered another railroad he got control of by shady means. That’s what I try to tell George. A man’s sins will be found out sooner or later. I’ve always believed in the justice of this world. Here … here’s another piece here. Did you read this piece about Henry Wallace’s speech, Rose?”

“No,” she said. “I want to finish this square tonight. I probably won’t get to the paper at all. Why don’t you go ahead and read it to me?”

“Well, there’s just a little bit here, but here’s what he said, and he said it to a bunch of bigwigs, too. Just goes to show you that selfish men don’t always run the government in this country. Here … he says, ‘How much more socially intelligent it would be to redistribute purchasing power in such a way as to put it effectively to work. Unemployed purchasing power means unemployed labor and unemployed labor means human want in the midst of plenty.’ There, now, isn’t that just what ails us in a nutshell? That’s mighty well put. Whatever you say about Roosevelt, this is quite a change from Hoover.”

Rose nodded grimly. “I suppose they’ll start finding out things about Hoover, now,” she said. “Just the way they have about Coolidge.”

“Oh, I think Hoover’s probably an honest man,” Will said. “Just scared to do anything for fear of getting on the wrong side of his Wall Street friends. I don’t know that there’s anything a Republican could have done. The country was just going crazy, that’s all.

“Say, I was just going to tell you how I got hold of some shearers today and here I see the Happy Farmer wrote his poem about that. Says, ‘Along about wool-clipping time, I’m jealous of the sheep, Who skip away and leave their clothes, Behind them in a heap.’ He makes it sound awfully easy. Sometimes I wonder if he ever lived on a farm, you know that? But other times he hits it right on the nose. Well, anyhow, I was going to tell you, I talked to a gang of fellows today over at Larsen’s, and they said they can come day after tomorrow. There’s four of them, and they look pretty fast. They think they can do the flock in a day and a half, so that will be just a few meals for you to cook. They figure on finishing Larsen’s tomorrow, and he had nearly six hundred. I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to Larsen about them, but I gathered he was satisfied.”

“They’re all alike,” Rose said.

“Well, I can tell you one thing, they were making him hump. He ought to have hired himself one more man—two helpers aren’t enough, with four shearers. I’ll get Ralph and George, I guess. I imagine George won’t have quite so much to say this year about what a mistake it was for me to feed the flock all winter.

“Why, just think! Last summer we got seven cents a pound—that was hardly fifty cents a fleece—minus ten or fifteen to get it sheared. But the way the prices have been going up, by golly, it wouldn’t surprise me if we’d get around two dollars this summer. I bet it’ll be two bits a pound by the time they get around to paying us for what we ship. And Hoover’s been blaming the low prices on the wool-growers. Too much wool, he said, that’s why there’s no market. But Roosevelt comes along and gets things to rolling again, and all of a sudden it looks like there is a market after all!”

And it wasn’t taking another war to move prices either, the way a lot of people said it would. In fact, there was good news of peace in the paper. Italy, Britain, France, and Germany had just signed a Four-Power Peace Pact at Rome. It was a treaty to last ten years and then be renewed.

“I think maybe the world is starting to get some sense, Rose. It looks like maybe people are finally going to spend money on something besides war. What do you think?”

“I think,” she said, “that we’re living in the Thousand Years of the Beast, right now.”

He tried to josh her out of it, or think of something else to talk about whenever she said that. “Oh, Rose! Well, then, if you think that, let’s take a vacation! We’ve never had one in our lives! Let’s go somewhere this winter. When the boom was on, everybody else took their big wheat checks and went off to Florida or some place. But we just stayed right here in the cold and snow. It’s cheap down there now—two or three dollars a day would get us a luxury room and meals. Come on, it’s our turn now.”

“Oh, Will, you don’t know what you’re saying! Ever since Harry closed the bank you’ve had one crazy idea after another! I couldn’t enjoy myself for one minute spending money we ought to leave the children.” Rose thought and then added, “George won’t take it now, but I don’t imagine he’ll be quite so proud after we’re gone and can’t see the good it’s doing them.”

“Oh, Rose, he’s not that way! He doesn’t want to spite us. He’s just an extra proud young man, that’s all—but I wish he wasn’t so blamed stubborn.”

He gazed at her quilt a minute. “You wait and see. George won’t let me pay him what I pay the shearers. ‘They’re skilled men,’ he’ll say. A skilled man is worth twice as much as a helper.’ And then he’ll work harder than any other man here, all day long.”

He searched for his glasses and then, remembering that he hadn’t been out of his chair, felt on the top of his head and flipped them back down to his nose. “I haven’t had such itchy feet for forty years,” he said. “I’d sure like to get a look at that Chicago fair.

“Says here, ‘The most spectacular event in the opening of the Century of Progress Exposition was the turning on of the thousands of lights in the Hall of Science. By some highly scientific process, which has to do with a photoelectric cell, the light which left Arcturus, a fixed star of the first magnitude, was caught at four observatories in the nation and beamed to throw the master switch at the fair when Postmaster General James A. Farley pressed a button. The light which threw the switch had been traveling through space for forty years to reach the planet Earth.’ Isn’t that remarkable, Rose? Think of it! Think of the things man has discovered just since the turn of the century. It hardly seems possible. By golly, I sure would like to go to that fair.”

“I suppose Mr. Farley thinks God made all the firmament so that he could push a button that was connected to a star some way.”

“No, no, that’s not the idea! The light was there! It was there all the time! And men just now figured out how they could use it.”

“Of course the light was there all the time. And now man thinks he can step up to the throne of God because of some puny trick. I tell you, the days are at hand. We will all see how puny we are.”

It depressed him when she was like this, and he felt as though he ought to do something about the terrible way she felt. He knew it was Stuart that made her feel this way. But he just felt too tired tonight. He shuffled his feet back into his slippers and wandered out the kitchen door. The full moon hurtled across the sky, riding over a wind-scattered flock of softly gleaming translucent clouds. The moon looked the way it looked through the wide-open door of a breezy boxcar when he rode it across the Kansas plains forty years ago.

He wondered where Stuart was tonight.

Shearing day dawned hot and muggy. The wind that Will had hoped would bring a bit of cooler weather from the northwest had died down during the night, and there were no clouds at all. He and Rose got up extra early, but it was already hot enough to make them sweat as they did the morning’s milking, and by the time George and the family arrived, Will had a bandanna tied around his forehead under his hat to keep the sweat out of his eyes. He was nervous with excitement. It was worth shearing this year. He wanted to get at it. Besides, any kind of harvest excited him. That was why he had come back from roving to be a farmer.

“What’s the matter with that Sundquist boy, anyway!” he wondered. “I told him to get here so we could get set up before the shearers come! Well, George, I guess you and I can wrastle the dip tank.”

The women lingered in the yard for one last bit of air before they began cooking. Finally Ralph Sundquist showed up, riding bareback on one of his father’s workhorses.

“The old man promised me the truck today,” he said, “but she wouldn’t start, no matter what I done to her. Like to’ve cranked my arm off.” He massaged the large muscle of his upper right arm.

“You can just turn your mare loose down below there,” Will said, “We’ll be fixing up the tank.”

As they headed for the windmill George said, “You’d think the old man would have sense enough to do something about that mare’s withers, wouldn’t you?” Will nodded, half sick. One thing he and George agreed on. They couldn’t bear to see an animal mistreated. The mass of weeping sores on Ralph’s old mare revolted them both. It was really inexcusable to let a horse’s shoulders get in that shape. Sundquist was just too tight to buy a decently padded collar for the poor beast. If it had been George’s horse, he would have bought the collar even if he had had to sacrifice something he badly needed for his own health or comfort. Think of that mare pulling a load against a pair of shoulders like that.

“Maybe they’re easing off on her,” Will said, wanting to believe what he was saying. “Maybe that’s why Ralph rode her today.”

They still had not finished pumping the dip tank full and getting the chemicals into it when the shearers arrived in a rattling pickup. The truck came up the driveway so fast that the dust it raised still hovered over the whole length of the lane by the time the truck had stopped. Will nailed the driver as he jumped out of the cab.

“You come up here like that again and you’re fresh out of a job,” he said. He thought he smelled beer. Perhaps Gebhardt was already selling it in his little back room, even though it wasn’t legal for two more weeks.

“Okay, okay,” the driver said.

The other three men had already unhooked the single chain on the tailgate and begun to unload their equipment. They were as rough-looking as the driver. Will had noticed before how a crew of roving workers always looked ornerier and more suspicious the minute they came on his own place than they had looked when he observed them on somebody else’s place. Itinerant workers were a different lot nowadays. Forty years ago, when he had been a temporary hobo, the crews were full of boys like himself, out to see a bit of the world on a harmless lark before settling down. But the men who had been coming through for the last two decades tended more and more to be like these ruffians—beaten men, looking forward to nothing.

What would they do with the sheep, he wondered. Two full days of pay from Larsen was enough to get them all three sheets to the wind. It was a cinch he wouldn’t pay them anything till they were through. With the price of wool up as it was, he wanted a good close job. He could lose as much on every fleece as it cost him to get it clipped if they didn’t take it off properly. He wished he hadn’t contracted to pay them by the hour; it might have been better to pay by the fleece so he could dock them on any sheep that wasn’t properly sheared.

Each of the four men set himself up in a separate stall with his equipment. The double doors at either end of the barn were wide open, but the building was airless; it was going to be mighty hot labor. Will hoped they would sweat out their beer in a hurry.

Ralph and George, with the collie circling the bleating sheep, drove a dozen head down through the yard from the shed and into a couple of stalls where Ralph stayed to be supply man for the shearers. Will herded each newly sheared sheep up the incline leading to the platform above the tank and shoved it off into the amber water, which reeked with creosote and tobacco and other poisons meant to kill various pests—the worst being ticks and scab mites.

George grabbed the terrified, sputtering animal by the folds of its neck, forcing it to swim the length of the tank, and then pulled and pushed it up to the platform at the other end. From there the sheep usually needed no more encouragement to run down the ramp and into the lane, bellowing and dripping and shaking from its cold bath and its drastic haircut. A newly shorn ewe, George thought, could look about as ridiculous as any critter in the world. Her neck was so surprisingly thin and long, and with the thick wool gone from her face, her forehead was low and bony.

As the oldest of the three men, Will ought to have assigned himself the least taxing job of keeping the shearers supplied with sheep and tying up the fleeces, but he wanted to be where he was in order to keep an eye on the kind of job the shearers were doing. He checked the closeness of every clip, running his fingers over the lightly fuzzed wrinkles of shorn skin as he guided each sheep up to the tank. He also made sure that any gouge got well dosed with a virulent solution of iodine. He had discovered a long time ago that the best way to run a farm was for its owner to be everywhere at once.

The first time he looked up at the sun to estimate the hour, he wondered how he would last till dinner. He had known the time in his life when he could work steadily and never even think to look up until the sun was standing so straight and hot over his shoulders that he knew it was noon. But now he felt the shocks of the struggling sheep tear at his middle, and when the first ewe with a couple of clipped teats came through, he burst into fury. He examined her quickly. She was still nursing. A lamb was in for a kick or two. He swabbed her with iodine and pressed a palmful of salve against her to ease the smart of her bath. Then he stormed back to the shearer from whose hands he had received her a moment before.

He had to shout above the uproar of the engine turning the long flexible shafts and the clippers buzzing at the ends of the shafts and the sheep bleating beneath the clippers. “Now if another ewe comes through with her tits cut like that I’ll dock you an hour’s pay! Either that or I’ll take it out of your hide. I’m paying you by the hour just so you’ll take your time and do a good close job without nicking these animals. You talked me out of paying you by the fleece, and now, by God, I expect you to do first-class work! Now go and take five minutes off and have a smoke and don’t send me any more sheep like that!”

The shearer, a bristly-faced young man wearing shamelessly taut Western-style jeans over his solid thighs, flopped his new sheep on its side and attacked it with the clippers. When he finished the sheep, he gave her a shove with his foot, not looking at Will, rolled himself a cigarette, and strolled out toward the fence where Lucy sat watching the dipping.

“Jesus, what a dirty business this is,” he remarked to her. Lucy did not know what to say to any stranger, least of all one who would swear for no good reason right in front of a child. She had been told to smile at people who talked to her, so she parted her lips to show the two top teeth that were still so big for her mouth and closed them again. She was conscious of the way her upper lip felt over the teeth, and she drew it down and hooked the teeth inside of it.

After she smiled she looked away from the shearer down at the damp trails scuffled into the hard ground by the horrified sheep.

“No critter on earth as dumb as a sheep,” he said. “Look at that old grammaw jumping around like a spring lamb.”

“It probably feels good to get all her wool off on a hot day,” Lucy said.

“Well, if she knows it’s gonna feel so good, why don’t she just set still then, when a fella’s trying to shear it off her? Tell me that? If a sheep ain’t the dumbest animal in the world, why don’t they learn, after while, that getting clipped off makes ’em feel good?” He blew a smoke ring that collapsed before he had time to show it to Lucy.

“Well, I don’t know,” she said, “But I’d like to have a lamb and feed it with a bottle every day.”

A thought came to him—a very funny thing that he had learned recently. “You know what happens to this here wool now?”

“Sure,” she said. “Grandpa and Daddy and Ralph put all the tied-up fleeces into the wool sacks and tramp it down to get three hundred pounds in each one and then Grandpa takes them to town. Then after while he gets the money. He told me he was going to get a whole lot this year, too.”

“Ya, but what happens after that?” he persisted.

“They make sweaters and coats,” she said dubiously. It was hard to imagine how this manure-matted, bug-infested stuff could be transformed into the red and blue sweaters she saw at Christmastime in the Penney’s store.

“Ya, but before that” he went on, satisfied that she didn’t know, “they wash it, see? You know what happens when you wash a frying pan or something, that has a lotta grease in it? You know how the grease all floats up to the top?”

“Yes,” she said, frowning distractedly at the pastures shimmering with heat. It was far from noon but she was feeling hungry.

He was irritated. She was pushing him out of her mind. “Well,” he said roughly, “they wash this here filthy-dirty wool just like a frying pan, see? And then ya know what they do with that dirty old grease all fulla manure? They make stuff for women to put on their face out of it! All kinds of cream. They put something in it to make it nice and white and some stinky perfume so the women don’t ever know how it used to smell, and all them women never know what they’re smearing all over their faces!” He laughed in coarse triumph. She was looking at him now, all right. “Your own ma uses it, I bet!”

“She does not!” Lucy cried. “She doesn’t ever put anything on her face, because we don’t believe in it, that’s why.” She stopped. If her father ever heard her contradict any grown-up person he might whip her, but she said it anyway. “Anyhow, I bet they don’t either do that.” She looked at him to see if he would tell on her.

“Oh, yes they do!” he said. “Maybe your ma don’t, on account of she knows where it comes from, but them city women all do.” He added in a high sissy voice, mimicking a woman talking on the radio, “Lady Esther’s Cole Cream. At your favorite drugstore cosmetics counter.” He flipped his cigarette butt into the wet path made by the sheep. “You’ll smear it all over your face, too, in a couple more years!”

“I will not!” she yelled so loudly that her father heard her above the noise of the sheep and shot her an ominous look, the way he did when there was company and she said something wrong. The shearer laughed lewdly. He was looking at a picture he had evoked for himself of a city girl wearing plenty of paint, like a girl in a movie, saucily angry with a man the moment before she succumbed in his arms.

He leered up into the little girl’s face. Then he flexed his spine against the fence rails, snapping his body forward and into a reluctant shamble back to the job.

Lucy sat glowering after him. There was always some new reason why it was an intolerable joke to be female. But she intended to find out if that was true about cold cream—not that she had ever thought of using it.…

In the house Rose and Rachel worked making ready the first of the season’s harvest feasts. Itinerant workers expected a well-stocked table; it was the women’s job to try to make up for the murderous pace their husbands set in the shearing stalls and the threshing fields.

The workers often tried to get the women to feel competitive about cooking. At noon they might say, “My that was good lemon pie, Mrs. Shepard. I reckon lemon pie is my favorite dessert next to chocolate cake with white frosting on it. Over at Mrs. Larsen’s last night we did have a good dark cake.”

That night there would have to be a devil’s food cake—three layers of it, topped by a thick gleaming crust of seven-minute frosting.

Most of the afternoon Lucy licked pans and dishes, ran errands, and herded Cathy about the house to keep her from being too much in the way.

“I’ll be glad when she decides to walk and gets up out of the dirt a little,” her grandmother said as she carried an enormous kettle of boiled potatoes away from the stove to drain them into another big kettle on the tin table. For supper she was going to make potato salad, because the weather was so hot.

When she had finished pouring off the water, she looked down at the baby, scooting about in a grindy pair of diapers. “I sweep it out and the wind blows it back in faster than I can sweep it out,” she said. “My mother walked when she was only eight months old, and she had eleven babies and of the eight of them that lived, there wasn’t one that didn’t walk before it was a year old. It ran in our family to walk early. When you think of all the petticoats we wore, I wonder how we did it.”

Both her grandparents liked to tell Lucy how her mother had been so little and walked so early that when she first walked she went right under the tin kitchen table without ever knowing it was there. They would laugh over how mad her baby mother got when she first started bumping her head on the drawer under the table. “You could tell she was just crying because she was mad. She really had a temper when she was little like that, but then she got over it. And talk! How she would chatter on and on. You ought to have heard her talking to her doll. It was just an old corncob doll, not a nice one like yours. Hardly any little girls had real dolls then. They cost so much more money in those days. But you just should’ve seen your mother put that corncob doll to bed every night, and cover it up just like it was a real baby.”

Lucy loved to hear them talk about when her mother was a little girl, though she could not have told why.

Tuesday, July 4

The midsummer was no less muddled than the spring. The British restrictions of food imports were beginning to ruin the South American farmers the way the North American farmers had already been ruined. Thousands of sheep were being slaughtered in Chile and left dead on the ranges because the farmers could find no market for mutton. In China the drought was so bad that no grass grew and the trees died. The people of China were eating each other and ants were dining on mutton in the Chilean hills. It did seem as though Secretary Wallace was right when he kept saying that the world’s problems were essentially a question of distribution.

On the other hand, Wallace’s experiment to redistribute the consumer’s dollar so that the American farmer would get more of it and the middleman less did not seem to be working. The price of a loaf of bread in wheat states went from six to eight cents—the thirty-three per cent increase being blamed by the flour millers on the thirty per cent processing tax they were paying. The AAA tax was being passed on to the consumer, exactly the way George had predicted it would. It wasn’t costing the middleman a thing. The question of distribution was going to have to be settled by the little men.

This very day he had talked with men at picnic tables who appeared to be wholly of his opinion. Freedom for poor men was no longer a reality, and the celebration of Independence Day was a mockery. The men in the Jamestown park seemed to be as restless, as ready as he was himself. Why sit tamely through this empty ritual of firecrackers when what the country needed was the kind of action that established Independence Day? Why settle any longer for the pops and bangs of a make-believe battle?

Holidays almost always disappointed George, even when they didn’t commemorate something that had become a lie. He worked fourteen or sixteen hours a day from the time plowing began until the harvest was in. He worked as long as the daylight would serve him and as long as his horses could last. Why could he not rest one day and enjoy himself? Today’s swim in the tepid James River had only enervated him when he had expected to be invigorated. Instead of resting him, a holiday seemed only to break his stride. It was as though he had got himself perfectly paced for a desert marathon that would end in failure and death if he so much as broke his stride a half dozen times. Now he fought for balance in the vast emptiness, while the sky tilted and the world fell away under him. The momentum that got him through the summer was temporarily gone, and he was aware that some day he would be old and this was the way it would feel.

The sun was still high and the main street of Eureka still broiling. Nobody had spoken for the entire thirty miles of the trip back from Jamestown. Lucy was half asleep in the back seat, and Rachel sat in front beside him with Cathy asleep on her lap. For the whole trip she had been as far away as the slowly moving, slowly mutant horizon. The whole space between them and the dry line of sky might as well have been between him and Rachel in the front seat.

He parked the car near Gebhardt’s Pool Hall—the only place in town that was open. They were going to get a celebrative pint of ice cream for supper. His throat was so dry he could hardly speak. “What’ll you have?” he asked Rachel.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter at all to me,” she said. “Ask Lucy—or get what you want yourself.”

Never would she commit herself to him—not even about the flavor of ice cream. He saw how it was—if he presented her with something she had asked for, then that gave him some claim on her. He didn’t give a damn what Lucy wanted. Lucy was a kid—she liked all ice cream. But his wife used his children a dozen times a day to hold him at a distance.

“Well what’s the use of getting any at all if you don’t care about it?” he asked angrily.

“I care! I care!” Lucy cried, quickly wide awake.

“All right, what’ll it be?” he said.

“Chocolate!” she said.

“Okay with you?” he asked Rachel.

“Fine,” Rachel said. “The baby’s going to wake up now that we’ve stopped, and she’ll be awful till I can get her fed. Let’s just get home as soon as we can.”

Who the hell wanted a holiday, anyhow? He wanted a fight.

He stalked into Gebhardt’s.

Everybody in the pool hall was too happy to want to fight. Legal beer for the first time since North Dakota entered the Union in 1889!

George looked around to see who was there. He might have known Wilkes would be sponging a drink on the Fourth of July. He was surprised, though, to see who was bustling about refilling the glasses. It was Annie Finley. Business was so brisk that it kept her sweating, and she had wiped her face so much that her mascara was all down on her apron. Dark wet half-circles showed under her arms, but as she passed by George the only smell he got was one of cheap perfume. She was obviously making a hit with the customers. Old Gebhardt stood over behind the counter watching her like the lewd old goat he was.

“Hey, neighbor!” Wilkes called. “Custer! Come on over and have a drink! Oh, my, doesn’t it make you sick to think of them making this stuff for thirteen years and then taking all the alcohol out again! Near beer for thirteen years! I tell you one thing, boys, I bet there was plenty of sampling that went on at them breweries before they took the kick outa their damn near beer! Come on, George! Have a drink! Good stuff, this is. None of that rotgut green beer. This ain’t out of Benjamin’s alley; it’s right out of that barrel over there! Come on, George! Three cheers for Roosevelt! And three more for Wild Bill Langer that took the near out of this here beer, by God! And three more for that great man, Richard M. Press, the finest sheriff this county ever had!” He waved at the big placard Press had put in Gebhardt’s window. The placard announced that Otto Wilkes’s real property and chattels would be auctioned on Saturday, July 15, to repay a long delinquent mortgage.

“No thanks, Otto. The old lady’s out in the car and she’d make me walk home if I come out of here smelling like you. Now if you was to offer me some of that dandelion wine Lester made that time, I might not be able to turn you down.”

Lester howled. “Oh that was plenty skookum! Tastiest, smoothest stuff you ever drank, if I do say so. A man could drain down a glassful and think it didn’t have no more bite than a glass of milk, but wait till he stood up—if he could!”

Rachel sat in the car wondering what was keeping George. The baby’s cheeks were deeply flushed and her hair was wet enough to wring out. She stirred, woke, and struggled to stand up. She began at once to make the complaining noises that preceded an earsplitting demand for food.

Despite Cathy’s grumblings, Rachel was aware of the paralytic silence around her. There were no trains, no cars, no horses, no one passing on the sidewalk. Except for an occasional loud laugh coming from Gebhardt’s down the street, the whole planet could have been a tomb. There was one other sound—the sound of an empty schoolyard on a twilit afternoon. It was the sound of the wind banging the hooks on a flag rope against a hollow flagpole somewhere behind her. It was not the sort of sound one associated with the flag on the Fourth of July. Where was George?

Finally he emerged from the pool hall, calling something gay over his shoulder. He came grinning back to the car.

“I bet he’s cleared a thousand dollars in that place since Saturday noon! And guess who quit at Gus and Ruby’s to cash in on the beer?”

Rachel didn’t really care. “Who?” she said.

“That Finley girl. She’s doing all right, too, I can tell you! She had an apron pocket about ready to bust with dimes. Pretty little thing, isn’t she?”

“Oh, George! What’s pretty about her? It’s all make-up!”

“Well—I can see why the boys at Gebhardt’s think she is.” He knew he never should have said it.

“They’re probably all so drunk they wouldn’t know Annie from her mother,” Rachel said. “Langer! Oh, I just hope the people of this state let him know what they think of him for this! Haven’t we had enough trouble here without making it legal!”

“Well, now, Rachel, that’s just why we’ve had so much trouble, for Pete’s sake! Why, before Prohibition, the Minneapolis bootleggers made huge fortunes bringing booze across the line. Why, every other store on Hennepin Avenue sold wine and liquor. And there was never a time when a man couldn’t walk down any street in Jimtown and hold out his hand behind him, like so, and say ‘blind pig’ out of the side of his mouth, and have somebody take the money out of the hand and put a jug of beer in it. The only difference between having Prohibition and not having it was that the bootleg stuff before Prohibition probably wouldn’t kill you—that’s all.

“But this stuff since nineteen-twenty—why, everybody and his brother have been cooking up mash from something — prunes, potato peelings, garbage—anything that would cook. Get her up around a hundred and eighty degrees so’s you get most of the alcohol up into the condensing pipes and not too much water and sour mash taste. Then you take the alcohol out of the pipes. For God’s sake, that’s all you have to do to make alcohol! But if you wanted to do it by the book, you could always write the U. S. Department of Agriculture. They had a good set of free instructions they’d be glad to send you, no questions asked.

“Hell, if a man wants to drink himself to death, he’ll find the stuff to do it with. Of course, if he gets a little Jamaica Jake or Old Horsey or the like, he can save himself money. It won’t take too much of that. I hear they’ve been making a lot of the stuff out of rotten cactus down there where Stuart is. Why don’t you ask him whether it’s a good idea to go ahead and make hooch legal?”

Rachel looked out her window without answering. George knew he’d gone too far and he wasn’t even sorry. He shut up, though, and started whistling “Turkey in the Straw.”

Presently he said, “This sure isn’t like the July Fourths I remember. We used to have a great big family reunion. Twenty-thirty-forty people—maybe more. Big baseball game, just in the family, after we ate our dinner. Did I ever tell you about the time Uncle Lon got a frog up his pants leg? I can see that just as clear as if it happened today! Uncle Lon was just sitting there stuffing himself and all of a sudden he started in yelling and jumping around, kicking the dishes and sandwiches every which way, shaking his leg in the air like he’d gone loco. I tell you, I never saw anything so funny in my whole life. There was Uncle Lon—he had a long white beard, did I ever tell you? And he was a schoolteacher, too—and mighty proud of his dignity.

“Well, I guess he stuck his leg so far in the air that the frog just couldn’t fall out. All I know is—I was just a little fellow then, about Lucy’s age—it seemed to me he must’ve jumped around like that for at least ten minutes before that frog let loose of his leg and fell out. Smack in the middle of the chokecherry jelly! You couldn’t believe it! You never saw such a sight as that scared frog in that gooey jelly.

“But at that, he wasn’t half as scared as Uncle Lon. When he finally got rid of that animal, Uncle Lon sat down and never said a word for about ten more minutes. He just kept pulling his pants leg up and sort of rubbing his leg there where the frog had been hanging on to him—he had the hairiest legs of any man I ever saw. It was no wonder that frog couldn’t get loose. But you know, you never could kid him about that frog? Never! But I’ll never forget that beard waving in the air—came clean down to his chest—took him years to grow that thing.”

Lucy was laughing. She had heard the story before, but it always made her laugh, partly because her father always sounded so gay when he told it. She wished too that families were big, the way they used to be, and that somebody would get a frog up his pants leg. That would be even better than going home to eat chocolate ice cream.

Friday, July 14

Although he didn’t feel up to it, Will had the meeting about Otto’s auction at his house. Most of the men who came were members of the Farmers’ Union, and Will had been a supporter of the union too long to back out now. After all, this was exactly the action the union advocated, and even the governor himself told them to do it.

If they let the sheriff get away with this sale, it just might be the beginning of the end for a lot of hard-working farmers in the county. All over the nation a thousand more farmers lost their farms every day. The year was half over, and in a hundred and eighty days of 1933, nearly two hundred thousand farmers had been dispossessed by banks and insurance companies.

The men at the meeting talked a good deal about the banks. What they were planning to do did not seem like much of a crime compared to what Harry Goodman did, that was a cinch. They were getting checks from the auditors of Harry’s bank now—for ten cents on the dollar. There were rumors that Harry was all set up in business far away. The Jew receivers had seen to it that their brother was taken care of. You couldn’t fight them, the way they stuck together. Not unless you got together among yourselves, too, and showed the sheriff that the farms around here were not going to be handed over to the city speculators for a song. If the law was going to let Harry Goodman go scot-free, then the law just better keep away from the farmers, because the law was good for nothing at all except to help the rich get richer at the poor man’s expense.

It was still fairly light when George came home from the meeting. He took his rifle out on the porch to clean it. This was what he’d been waiting for. That damned Press thought he was pulling a fast one—starting off with a deadbeat like Wilkes. But Sheriff Richard M. Press would learn a thing or two tomorrow. He might even learn that farmers could shoot rings around his pantywaist deputies with their silly Sunday afternoon target practice. Let those deputies go practice on white jack rabbits running against the glare of a snowfield before they tangled with the men who would be at Otto Wilkes’s place tomorrow.

Inside the house Rachel finished the dishes and put the yeast to set in the potato water for the Saturday’s bread baking. She could smell the fine oil on the rag George attached to the end of the long wire. She saw the way his great shoulders hunched over the rifle and the way his arm bent and straightened as he swabbed the inside of the blue-black barrel, and she saw the brass jackets of the shells he had taken out of the rifle lying behind him on the gray porch boards.

Finally he finished with his gentle twistings of the rag inside the barrel, and he held up the business end of the gun to sight down it into the light showing through from the unlocked breech. Then he wiped the outside of the barrel with the same rag, loaded the shells, snapped the bolt closed, swung the butt against his shoulder, drew a lightning bead on a small tin patch on the barn, and sent a bullet through it.

He twisted around and stared in at her through the screen. “What’s the matter with you?” he said. “I can always patch the patch, can’t I? I’ve always wondered if I could hit that little bit of tin from here. And I did it in bad light, too. Did you hear him ring!”

“Are you going to take that gun tomorrow?”

“Sure,” he said. “Might have to get me a crow or a buzzard with it. Lots of mean critters around. A man can’t tell when he’ll be able to pick up a little bounty.”

“Oh, George, please don’t take it,” she begged. What had got into him? He was hot-tempered, yes—but his violence had never before been calculated like this.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “The farmer has to make his own law now. That’s all we’re aiming to do—show the sheriff that those crooked Jews in Jimtown are not going to take over this whole damn county. We can’t wait any more for the government to stick up for us. If the government was going to stick up for us, Harry Goodman would be in jail now—isn’t that so? We built this country. We fought for it before and now we have to fight again. You just can’t seem to understand that, can you?”

Saturday, July 15

It was a beautiful morning for mowing hay, lying in a hammock, weeding the garden, having a picnic (watermelons were ripe), or experimenting with anarchy.

George stood in the open screen door. “Looks like it’s going to be another scorcher,” he said. “I‘ll take the car if you’re not going to need it.”

“I don’t need it,” Rachel said.

He put the gun in the back seat and laid an old blanket over it. This was not the first time he had headed for Otto’s place to help him out of some kind of mess. He could never say no to Otto, maybe because he despised him so much. Otto owed him seed corn, a post-hole digger, God knew how many pounds of assorted nails, a couple of butchering days, and weeks of transporting Lucy to and from school to repay him for the transporting he did of Otto’s brood. Oh, the sheriff thought he was pretty safe, all right, picking on Otto. What the sheriff didn’t know was that hayseeds weren’t as dumb as they might look. They understood the principles the sheriff operated on just as well as if they’d been all dandied up in tailor-made suits of clothes.

Although George was Otto’s closest neighbor, he was far from being the first man to arrive. He was surprised to see so many there already, because he was an hour early himself; he’d been too nervous to stay around home any longer. He wondered just what they would all do when the chips were down. After all the big talk last night, were they going to back out at the last minute? It might take only one weak man with one honest bid to upset the applecart. He had the feeling that they were all watching each other. Well, they could watch him all they wanted to, by God. Nobody had to worry about G. A. Custer turning yellow.

He looked around for Otto and saw him hovering on the edge of a conversation. They were all going to be tough on Otto today. They were going to let him know that the meeting and the things they were going to do didn’t change a thing—that he was nothing but a loudmouth deadbeat and they were here mainly on account of their own skins, not his.

Somebody tapped his elbow and he whirled around to find Otto’s half-witted nine-year-old behind him.

“What do you want, Irene? This is no time for a little girl like you to be pestering around! You get along into the house, now.”

“I just wondered if you brought Lucy to play with me,” Irene said.

“I just told you this isn’t a place for little girls to be fiddling around. You get along, now!”

She turned and headed for the house, but she stopped on the steps of the porch to look back to the road. The sheriff’s big car pointed its nose into the driveway, but the men were making no move to clear the way for him.

Treat us like mules and we’ll act like mules—so far so good, George thought. The sheriff leaned steadily on his horn and the men began to inch aside. But he didn’t follow behind their slow withdrawal. He waited till the driveway was entirely clear and then he roared up it at thirty miles an hour and braked with the bumper of the car almost touching the steps. A brand-new Oldsmobile followed the sheriff like a scared kid hanging on his mother’s skirts.

Nothing made a farmer any madder than having a city man drive down his private road like it was Highway Number 10. If a city man killed one of the chickens he sent squawking into the dirt, he would try to jew the farmer down to a few cents less than the market price and then go home and complain to his wife about how a hayseed had held him up. George remembered how a lightning-rod salesman had driven into his yard that way and broken a rooster’s leg. Then the fellow had had the gall to ask George why he didn’t keep his turkeys and chickens penned up.

“Well, now then, I reckon they don’t clutter up the yard as bad as birds like you! Those droppings help out the grass a little. What do you do with your own manure, besides come highballing in here and try to sell it to me?” George had asked him.

The salesman argued that George could eat “that old hen,” as he called it, and George had delivered the worst insult he could think of on the spur of the moment. “That’s no hen! That’s a rooster! How come a queer bird like you don’t know a cock when you see one?”

Now if the fellow hadn’t been a pansy, he certainly would have crawled out of his car then, and let a man get a fair swing at him. But the city men never did get out of their cars.

George knew that every man there had had experience with smart-alecks driving into the yard and nearly clipping a dog or a kid, and even more experience with crazy hunters trespassing on his property and leaving a gate open, or worse—just making a gate with a pair of wire-cutters so he had to chase his stock all over the county by the time he discovered the break in the fence. George had a notion that the sheriff’s dust-raising entrance might do just the opposite of what he intended it to do. No doubt he was trying to show off his authority to a bunch of hicks, but George didn’t think anybody was going to look at it that way. No, they were all just going to remember the times when some other city man had done the same thing.

The representative of the law opened the driver’s door and pushed a putteed leg out into the dust settling over the fenders and running boards.

The leg was followed by the rest of Sheriff Richard M. Press, who was nearly as fat as George had expected him to be. His heavy leather Sam Browne belt seemed much more necessary to support his belly than to help hold up the pistol that rode on his left thigh.

Both his deputies were on the thin side. Apparently the sheriff himself got all the graft; the deputies must not have anything on him yet. One deputy climbed out of the other side of the driver’s seat and let the second out of the back. The second deputy was obviously low man on the totem pole; he had to sit in back behind the wire, where there were no inside handles on the doors. George wondered if anybody he knew would be riding in that back seat on the way back to Jamestown.

The second deputy had been riding with the sheriff’s auction block and he lugged it up toward the porch where Irene was still standing, her mouth even farther open than usual. He trod on the prongs of a kitchen fork left on a step by one of the little boys, and when the handle of it flipped up at his leg, he jumped as though it was a rattlesnake, fell against the elegant splintered balustrade, and went through the weak step with his boot heel. Irene began to laugh wildly, clasping her hands over her shiny lips while she staggered back and forth on the porch.

Somebody yelled, “Make him pay for that step, Otto! Don’t let him get away with that! Call the sheriff, Otto!”

George wished he had thought of that crack himself. It sounded like it came from Lester Zimmerman.

The representative of the Big Man in Jamestown climbed out of his Oldsmobile with a whole briefcase full of authority under his arm. George could see him wince when the dust squished up over his pointed, two-toned shoes, perforated in a dandy style. He was wearing a silk suit and a panama hat with a silk polka-dot band around it.

George noticed that both he and the sheriff mounted the steps very respectfully. The sheriff’s star was dwarfed by the size of his chest. He’d probably taken half his hush-money in moonshine for the last thirteen years. He’d probably drunk enough of it to kill a man who wasn’t too mean to die.

The second deputy set up the auction block while the first one hovered near the man in the silk suit, like the rich man’s stooge that he was. All four of them stood in a line on Otto Wilkes’s rotting porch—soldiers of the old order on a rampart of Victorian gingerbread. Behind them, Irene giggled in her corner. The silk suit man scowled and spoke from the side of his mouth to the deputy. The deputy stared at Irene and whispered to the sheriff. The sheriff jiggled his shoulders and grinned. Nobody approached Irene.

Big and fat as he was, the sheriff had a high tenor voice that rose to an almost effeminate pitch when he strained to be heard above the crowd. It was a crime for a man like that to try to run an auction. Take off the bastard’s uniform and what would you have? A potbellied, bowlegged dude that pretty near any man there could lick in a fair fight. His .45 pistol was nothing but a joke in open country where a man could be picked off from a mile away. A gun like that belonged in the movies. It was not guns that made a man like George respect the law—or cease to respect it.

“All right!” His voice cracked. “You men out there! Let’s have it quiet, so we can have a fair and square sale here!” The men quieted at once, as if by a signal decided on beforehand among themselves—a signal that had nothing to do with the sheriff’s order. He seemed taken aback by such prompt obedience, as though he hadn’t quite got ready his next sentence when he was confronted by the silence he had commanded for himself. He took a paper from the hands of the man in the silk suit, listened to a few things the man had to say, and turned back to the auction block. It was clear, all right, who ran the law in Stutsman County—silk-suited moneylenders, that was who.

The sheriff walked back to the front of the porch, looking like the employee he was, and began to read from the paper, which explained that the mortgage-holder, having made due allowances for “conditions,” was now forced to sell the mortgaged property in order to fulfill obligations to stockholders in the insurance company. Not that everybody didn’t already know what it was going to say.

Still, the words of the paper were almost like the words of the Bible, and the ideas were those on which the whole American economic and political system had been built. Anybody would have to admit that hardly a man there could ever hope to own land without the institution of mortgages. George could feel the faltering of the crowd, and he could tell the sheriff felt it, too. Were all those men at the meeting last night going to turn out to be nothing but sheep now, after all?

It wasn’t hard to see how a man like the sheriff got ahead. In times like these there was practically unlimited money behind a man who could run a county. George wondered how far the sheriff was prepared to go today to show the Big Man how well he could run his county.

The sheriff announced that the first offering on the auction block would be Otto’s Percherons. He was a shrewd one, all right. He obviously figured that some weak lover of horseflesh was going to break down and bid on that team. The Percherons, like Otto’s house, were his last legacy from the bonanza-farm days. Old Man Wilkes had owned close to a hundred champion Percherons, and he never sent an eight-horse team into his fifty-seven hundred acres that wasn’t perfectly matched for color. The ancestors of Otto’s team had broken the sod on George’s farm.

But the Percheron strain had proved to be more glorious and durable than the Wilkes strain. To George it no longer seemed appropriate for a Wilkes to own such horses. Otto did not deserve them. It was not hard to figure out that that was just what the sheriff hoped they were all thinking. Almost every day a farmer had to try to think one step ahead of what some mean animal was going to do next. It wasn’t nearly as much of a challenge to figure out what was in the mind of the sheriff as to figure out what was in the mind of an old cow that had hidden her new calf somewhere in a fifty-acre pasture full of gullies and six-foot weeds.

Little thousand-pound Morgans could supply as much horsepower as a man usually needed now that there was no sod to break, and they ate about half of what a two-thousand-pound Percheron required. Nevertheless, if a man couldn’t get rid of feed grain for love nor money, then he might as well feed champion Percherons as Morgans, mightn’t he? The sheriff understood that every man there would be asking himself that question.

When the two deputies gingerly descended the steps and headed for the barn, every man knew they would not come back without the horses, because Otto had been complaining ever since the sheriff had come out and laid down the law about what chattels were to be where. But no man was really prepared for what the deputies led out of the gloom beneath the high open doors. Otto must have risen even earlier than any of the rest of them. He had curried the last bit of chaff and manure from the dark-gray fetlocks and polished the last loose hair and speck of dust from the enormous dappled rumps. He had tied their clipped manes into red-ribboned soldiers marching up the mountains of their necks. He had braided their tails with red ribbon, too, but it was the frivolous parade of tiny ribbons arching over the magnificent necks that emphasized, as nothing else could have, the four thousand pounds of horse perfection that were being offered for George and Otto’s other neighbors to bid upon.

George’s heart leapt as though he had been transported into the show ring of a great fair. Here was a team such as men like him had yearned for all their lives—ever since they had been three-year-old boys at the fairs, standing as close as they dared to the stalls in the Equine Building, breathing in the sweet smell of hay and sweat and horse. They had all spent hours looking up at those horses and they each possessed an infallible image of such a horse from every possible angle. They had begun their loving admiration when they were so short that they still stood far beneath the horses’ bellies and their eyes were but a few inches above the splendid hocks—marvelous peaks of bone, majestic as the knuckles of God. Every fall at the fair their eyes had been a little higher, and they had committed to unfading memory a little more of a champion’s configuration.

George remembered the feeling of stepping worshipfully aside when the owners came to lead the nervous animals from their stalls, and he remembered how it was to follow along and watch what happened in the hot, brilliant ring before the grandstand, where the judges paced back and forth with dazzling white spats over their shoes, swinging their canes, cocking their white straw hats, writing on score cards. Otto’s Percherons were the kind of horses that wore the ribbons away from the ring.

The sheriff turned his head from the horses to smile at the silent men. He was a man, George thought, lower than a worm’s belly button.

“I reckon you men all know these horses!” the sheriff yelled. “You all know they’ve won some prizes at the State Fair! A beautifully matched team. Who’ll start in at one and a quarter for the team? One and a quarter, one and a quarter!” He was trying to sound like a professional auctioneer, but he wasn’t very convincing.

Not that he needed to be convincing. There wasn’t a man there who could not have scared up a hundred dollars or so by selling his two best horses. They were shabbily dressed men and they all had to go home to stricken farms after this shindig was over. How could they help lusting after the glory of that team?

“All right, men,” the sheriff shouted. “If I don’t hear one and a quarter, I’ll up it to one and half before I even hear the first bid. Now who’ll give me one and a quarter?”

George felt an earthquake unhinging his legs and rattling his head. He lifted his voice over the crowd. “It’s an insult to fine horseflesh for us men here not to bid on an offer like that! I’ll give you one and a quarter—one dollar and a quarter, I bid—one buck and two bits. That team is worth that any day!”

The tremors still fluttered in his stomach. Now, surely, somebody would jump in after him and help to break this thing up quickly before the sheriff hypnotized them all.

There was a fair amount of nervous laughter, but nobody said anything. The men were dazed, as though they had wakened from a beautiful dream to find the dream standing in front of them. Nobody could take his eyes off the Percherons.

Both of them were restive under the fearful hands of the city men. They couldn’t use their braided-up tails against the flies swarming over them, and the muscles of their thick hides flickered steadily over the ribs and shoulders and down the legs. The deputy holding the gelding apprehensively eyed the dappled skin rolling over the mammoth planes and joints of his horse, but the deputy holding the stallion had much greater worries.

He looked very small and impotently urban. The brim of his hat came below the stallion’s nostrils and the broad chest of the animal was like a wall behind him.

The stallion was in a state of monstrous excitement. It was the kind of moment to bring a fleeting wistfulness to the purest of men—the kind of moment that had for centuries inspired cave paintings, tile murals, and ceremonial costumes. It was the kind of moment that the deputy was scarcely qualified to deal with.

The men emerged from their dream to become conscious of a mare standing by Lester Zimmerman’s wagon. She was making feverish signals to the stallion and Lester had both hands on her halter. Otto looked over toward Lester and gave him a quick grin.

Lester had prudently unhitched the mare as soon as he arrived, and now he let her go. She sprang away from him to meet her muscular prince.

The stallion plunged and knocked the deputy off balance. The man yanked himself back to his feet by the halter rope and ran with the horse. He bounced behind the driving shoulders like a man tied to a locomotive. The stallion, as unhampered as a locomotive, had forgotten all about the man attached to his halter. The rope burned out of the deputy’s grip and he fell aside without even a wound to show for his disgraceful efforts.

The men who had demurred so long in letting the sheriff’s car up the drive took no time at all to clear a path from the stallion to the mare.

George wondered at the ignorance of the deputy in trying to manage such a horse with nothing but a halter. Had the fellow thought a halter was a bridle? Didn’t city people know that no man could ever trust any stallion? Didn’t they know the world was full of stallions so mean they’d as soon as bite your arm off as look at you? Wilkes himself had a goat running around the farm that had climbed into a Percheron stallion’s manger for a peaceful summer afternoon’s nap. When the horse returned to his stall from the day’s work, he went in after the goat and took the tip of its face off in one snap of his jaws. Otto’s goat had no nose now, but its nostrils were still there—just holes in its blunted muzzle. It had recovered, but it was a funny sight—and a memorable one.

Didn’t city people know that out on the range with nobody to get in their road, the mustang stallions ripped each other to the bone with their big yellow teeth and commonly fought till one was killed? This little city man was probably damned lucky that the mare had been there to distract the stallion before he got other ideas.

The horses thundered away together, the mare’s harness jangling and sliding from side to side. It was a cumbersome, workaday wedding garment. Watching them fleeing toward their assignation, Lester remarked to George that it was too bad about the crupper strap, but probably it wouldn’t bother a pecker like that too much. Oscar Johnson heard him and passed the remark on to his neighbor.

“Who brung that mare in heat in here?” yelled the sheriff.

But nobody heard him. The jokes and guffaws wended their way through the crowd. The sheriff dropped his hand toward his pistol and then he picked up his auction hammer instead. When the men were ready, they fell back into their complete, unnerving silence. They wouldn’t even bother to heckle him—any more than the stallion had bothered to kick the deputy.

“All right,” the sheriff said. “We’ll put the Percherons up again. Who’ll give me a hundred and fifty dollars?”

“Who’ll fetch the stallion back?” Oscar Johnson roared. “I didn’t hardly get a good enough look at him to risk a bid.”

“Now you men out there watch your step or I’ll run you in for inciting to riot!” the sheriff cried.

“Don’t arrest me, for Christ’s sake!” Oscar yelled back. “Arrest the horse!”

“Now, by God, we’ve had enough of this!” The sheriff spoke to the two deputies and both of them took hold of the gelding’s halter to lead him back to the barn—a hundred and fifty pounds of man on either side of a ton of horse.

“Those little fellas look as useless as tits on a boar, don’t they?” George inquired of Lester.

“If their brains was dynamite it wouldn’t blow their nose,” Lester agreed.

Some of the men in that crowd had not enjoyed themselves so much since the days when they ganged up to badger a female teacher, feeling the first restless power of their manhood. They hadn’t run into this schoolroom kind of authority since their graduation from the eighth grade, and they were beginning to be exhilarated by their return to the game they used to play—the mass defiance of the helpless against the authority standing before them. Only this time the game was more fun than it had ever been before, because it was so much more serious.

The deputies came back with Otto’s other team, contrasting so pitiably with the Percherons that the crowd began to laugh again. These were an ungainly pair of sinister creatures that had recently run half wild on ranges in the far West. When the Depression had got so bad that farmers couldn’t afford to buy gas for their tractors, the horse traders out West began corralling bunches of wild mustang mares, running them with domesticated draft stallions—big males to increase the size of the colts—and raking in fancy profits. By the looks of them, these two had been sired by Belgians that were more than twice as big as their untamed mothers.

This team was as badly mismatched as the Percherons were perfectly matched. They were both geldings but one was black, with a complicated brand on his rump that had burned off all the hair on a patch the size of a man’s hand. He had probably been stolen once, and therefore branded twice. The other was a sorrel as ewe-necked, paunchy, and buck-kneed as a living horse could be. Neither of them was worth more than twenty-five or thirty dollars, and the buyer would be sure to discover that they had various nasty stable vices which would not show until they were taken home.

After the laughter, though, the crowd was quiet again. George couldn’t bear the tension any longer. “I’ll start this pair of moth-eaten critters at two bits!” he shouted.

“Thirty cents!” came a voice from behind him.

“Thirty-five!” came another.

“Take it easy, boys,” Lester scolded. “You’re getting way past me. Thirty-six!”

“Thirty-seven!”

Clarence Egger appeared beside George. “It’s as good as a vawdville show,” he snickered. “I never really thought it would work. I gotta hand it to you, George.”

“Thirty-seven and a half!”

“Thirty-eight!”

“Hell,” said George, “if Lester wants them two roarers that bad, let him have ‘em. I’m not going any higher.”

“Now listen here,” shouted the sheriff. “This man standing right here behind me has got a perfectly legal mortgage on this property. Now let’s just cut out this tomfoolery and get down to business. Who’ll give me thirty dollars for the team?”

“Which team?”

“I said, cut it out! This sale is going to go on!”

“Forty cents!”

“I’m not having that kind of sale!” the sheriff screamed.

“If you don’t aim to have a sale what did you waste our tax money printing up those signs for?” George wanted to know.

The little zephyr of levity had blown itself out. It was as though a wind, lifting up the light silver backs of the willow leaves along a river, had died down and let them drop to show their dark tops again. The crowd showed how quickly it could become another kind of crowd. George’s chest grew tight with exultation. This was the way it was going to be when the big fight came.

“Yeah, if he don’t want to have this sale, maybe there just might be some other way we can get our tax money out of those signs—or at least our money’s worth!”

“All right, now,” the sheriff said. George thought he sounded desperate. “We’ll just forget about horses for a minute and go on to sheep. You all know how wool is going up. Wilkes has fed them sheep for you all winter. Keep ’em this winter and cash in next summer. Now then, I’ll start ’em at two dollars a head, in lots of twenty, take ’em as they come, young or old, or any wethers along with the ewes and lambs. Just the fleece off’n each one of ’em this summer brought in two dollars or more. Who’ll start, now, at forty dollars for lots of twenty?”

George spoke up again. “Yeah, and once Otto got the wool off, it was a wonder those sheep held together at all. Skinniest sheep I ever saw in my life. Five cents a head.”

The sheriff conferred with the man in the silk suit. The man said something to Irene.

“A telephone!” she shrieked.

The man turned back to the sheriff, and the two deputies started down the steps. It’s over, George thought, but the sheriff pounded again with his hammer and shouted, “Now, then, we’ll have a little recess for a while till some real bidders get here. Anybody that wants to bid can stay. Anybody that doesn’t might as well go home. It’ll be a long hot spell of waiting,” he finished solicitously.

“I think we got a few too many slickers around here right now, don’t you?” George asked. He moved in front of the deputies just in time to cut them off from the sheriff’s car, and leaned innocuously against the door of it. He rested the heel of one large work shoe on the running board and braced an elbow in the open window.

The deputy who had let the stallion escape stepped up to redeem himself.

“Get away from there,” he said. “That’s county property.”

“That means I own a little bit of it then, don’t it?” George said. “I reckon, for the time being, till you can get your pettifogging shysters to work on it, I’ll just settle for this little piece of running board, here”—he clunked his heel down, sending a shudder through the car—“and this little piece of windowsill.”

“This here is county property,” the deputy said again. “You get away from there, now, and let me get inside. I got my orders from Sheriff Press, and you know it.”

George took his elbow out of the window and swung his foot to the ground and straightened up. He looked around the crowd. Didn’t they all know that if Press got some city bidders out here, the jig was up? Nobody made any overt move to back him up; on the other hand, the men had pushed in around him and the deputies, so that there was no chance for the sheriff to worm his way through to them.

A gigantic double-barreled shotgun materialized like a thunderbolt in the fidgety grip of Wallace Esskew. Nobody ever knew what to expect from Wally. He had a funny high laugh that was more scared guinea hen than it was human. He wasn’t married—just lived at home with his parents and brothers. More than any man there he could afford to get himself out on a limb.

Wally let out his funny deranged laugh. The deputies jumped when they saw the cannon. “Nothing but rock salt in here,” Wallace giggled. “I was just afraid one of these little Wilkes kids might get at it there in the car. I just remembered I had it cocked and ready to go because I was aiming to chase down them chicken thieves the next time they come back to our place.” He grinned and respectfully bobbed his head again and again at the deputies, while the gun wavered in his uncoordinated hands. Nobody claimed that Wally was crazy—just peculiar. Nobody ever knew what was in his head.

No man considered that giving a rock-salt lesson to a chicken thief was really shooting him. The sheriff and the deputies obviously understood that the thought of filling official pants with rock salt would appeal to almost every man in the crowd. The sheriff had come to perpetrate a farce, not to be the hero of one. It might be disastrous to his reputation if he had to drive back to Jamestown with his pants full of rock salt. If all the men there had rock salt in their guns and he fired into the crowd, it would be said that he returned lead for salt. Farmers still had one vote apiece, and they took their votes seriously. And if any rock salt should find its way into that silk suit …

It seemed to George that they had him. He probably had a couple of tear-gas bombs in the car; he could use one to show the Big Man that he was doing his best. But that might be the best way to stop a load of rock salt—fired, of course, by a man who was so blinded he couldn’t see what he was doing. He could place them all under arrest, but George didn’t imagine they would all just climb in their cars and follow obligingly along to the clink. He could start taking their names and addresses, but he would probably have to do that at gunpoint, and it would hardly be sensible for him to encourage any more gun-thinking with the kind of reinforcements he had at the moment. He could come back with a posse, but he might find himself confronting a troop of state militia. Who knew what Wild Bill Langer might do? They were only seventy miles from Bismarck, and Langer had only been governor for a few months—he might still be crazy enough to do what he had said he would do.

In any case, George reasoned triumphantly, if Sheriff Press left and came back, it was certainly more likely that he would find the militia waiting for him than that he would find any of the men facing him now, with the exception of Wilkes, of course.

Like most politicians, the sheriff had got elected because of his big broad smile that forced people to smile back at him. He smiled his way through the tight crowd, and he was still smiling when he looked up at George. The man in the silk suit was so close behind him that he might have been joined to him, like a Siamese twin.

“Stare him down, George,” somebody said.

“I never argue with a fellow this big,” the sheriff said lightly. “I just ask him if he’ll kindly move aside so I can get in my car and go home.”

George hesitated and then stepped back. Sheriff Press climbed into his official car and started the engine to show that he meant what he said. The deputies found room to pass through the crowd then, and got into the front seat with him. Everybody forgot about the real villain till it was too late to give him a scare—the man in the silk suit was already sitting behind the wheel of his Oldsmobile. He had his window rolled almost up, and it was a safe bet that he had the door locked.

The sheriff took off his cavalry hat and leaned his head out the window. “I reckon you’ll have to back out first, Mr. Burr,” he called tactfully. Mr. Burr did not need to be coaxed.

Once again the dust took a long time to settle over the crowd but this time the dust proved that little men, not the moneylenders, were in control. The little men had shaken off the county sheriff with as much impunity as that impetuous stallion had rid himself of the useless deputy.

The law was an abstraction, like money, that functioned only so long as the majority partook of it, possessed it, believed in it, and felt committed to it. The law seemed quite as insubstantial now as the numbers they had once believed in—all the numbers that represented what they thought they had safely stored in Harry’s bank.

What had happened this morning in Otto Wilkes’s squalid yard proved that the system of the whole nation was so rotten it was on the very edge of collapse. It was too late to try to restore the system in pieces, with Roosevelt’s bureaus and bureaucrats.

“Well, we did a good morning’s work, boys!” George said. “There goes a couple of weasels that found out it’s going to take more than a damned piece of paper before they can kick a man off his land.”

He wanted to make a speech. He wanted to say, “We are fighting in defense of our homes. Our petitions have been scorned; our entreaties have been disregarded. We entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them.” It had been a long time since William Jennings Bryan said that. He’d been dead for nearly ten years now. George had memorized that speech for his oration when he graduated from the eighth grade. A man never forgot things he memorized when he was young. Kids nowadays didn’t do anywhere near enough memorizing. They didn’t even have to learn the Declaration of Independence.

“Now that we know how to do it,” George said aloud, “we have to stick together and break up the next sale, too. We can’t let let them get the jump on us again. This revolution is fifty years overdue now.”

“By God, that was the funniest thing I ever seen!” Clarence Egger was nearly beside himself, carried away by the morning’s entertainments, not by what had been proved and accomplished. Talking about vaudeville shows. Lapping up other men’s fights. The bleating little sheep. He kept pounding Wallace Esskew on the back with his one arm. “Old Dick Press really thought you was going to pepper his ass with rock salt!”

Wally’s blankness could be comical. “What rock salt?” he said.